BECOMING XVI: NECESSITY

We now come to Necessity, that which “is so because it is”, as Hegel terminates
these difficult three introductory paragraphs (149). I will take them as a whole
before reading the Zusatz to 147.

We have then “a circle of possibility and immediate actuality”. All the indications
are that Hegel not merely “has time in mind” but that he is guided by the
previous unfolding of the dialectic (he explicitly prescinds from mere “discussion”
and so we may on occasion do the same) to a conceptual representation which
clearly show the necessity, at a certain moment of the dialectic, of a temporal
process, of Time, without his needing inappropriately to mention it, as I am doing.
Time itself, along with nature and individual mind as a whole, are moments of the
dialectic. In immortality nature and individual are absorbed and thereby uniquely,
most properly and without loss activated, i.e. not merely “for the first time” or as
it were parousially. There is no “End of Time” if time is not, nor could there be
anyhow since the expression, understood temporally, is a straight contradiction.
There is much of Hume in Hegel and Hume is thus, so to say, redeemed, if he
needs it. He is anyhow absorbed, not needing to be neurotically dismissed, as by
the partisans of “restoration”, a word always smelling of death and decay.

This circle, as “externality (of actuality)”, “is what is called Real Possibility.”
Called by whom? Here is a hint of concession to the immediate. Yet, as circle, “it
is the totality, and thus the content, the actual fact or affair in its all-round
definiteness.” We are speaking of Essence as replacing Being, but at the same
time of Idea and Manifestation as one, going a step beyond speaking of Idea and
its manifestation. A relation of God and Nature transcending contingency is also
intimated, though contingency is contained within it as dialectical moment.

This circular unity, again, “realises the concrete totality of the form, the
immediate self-translation of inner into outer, and of outer into inner.” The self-
translation is immediate, i.e. the unity is this translation, which yet remains
precisely a translation, while “realises” gives the link with “Real Possibility”. “This
self-movement of the form is Activity, distinguished now from Actuality. Activity
carries into effect “the fact or affair as a real ground which is self-suspended to
actuality”. It carries into effect, again, “the contingent actuality, the conditions;
i.e. it is their reflection-in-self” and, at the same time, these conditions are self-
suspended “to another actuality, the actuality of the actual fact.” Fact and
conditions pass into one another and this is necessity, their necessity. “If all the
conditions are at hand, the fact (event) must be actual; and the fact itself is one
of the conditions.” The fact itself is one of the conditions. Just one, it is surely
implied, recalling Hegel’s dialectical placing of Existence earlier. As with Kant
previously, a long meditation upon Hume is surely evidenced here. Why does
Hume speak of causality as a necessary connection, only distinguishing cause
from effect in terms of before and after, here disappearing in the “circle” of
contingency?
But then the fact itself, if it is “one of the conditions”, must be condition for some
new fact behind the fact, or is this rather the fact over again? That is, as infinite,
as for Hegel it must finally be since each category is such as representing, in its
moment, the Absolute, must not the fact ever direct to further recesses, as
thought thinking itself thinks itself thinking itself (cf. McTaggart’s scheme of
infinite reflexive perception of perception, “determinate correspondence”) or as
knowledge includes knowledge of knowledge ad infinitum?

The reason Hegel gives for his thus reducing “fact” from its more usual
“clinching” role is that “being in the first place only inner, it is at first itself only
pre-supposed.” There is, indeed, an ambiguity about “fact”, which may easily
strike readers of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Fact aspires to connect with reality
beyond all argument, yet it is squarely based in our language, such as that “It is
a fact that...” Facts are irreducibly propositional and hence even relational. Yet
they are presented in isolation, the abstractive essence of fact, precisely as
demanding to be related. They are not, for example, substances. Fact is indeed
pre-supposed, by our system of predication one might well say, but “at first only”
only! This, that Hegel calls “developed actuality”, dialectically developed this can
only be, is Necessity, viz. this “real Possibility” we have been discussing. As thus
presupposed, however, a fact is what “is so because its circumstances are so,
and at the same time it is so, unmediated: it is so, because it is.” It is brute,
“brute fact”. Thus we naturally regard and speak of what we immediately
experience before asking “why” about it. As developed and explained here it
forms part, or logical moment rather, of a Necessity not immediate to us.

He will say of Activity, and we note it already now, that it carries into effect,
although it is “the movement”, yet “has... an independent existence of its own
(as a man, a character)” requiring, he adds, both conditions and fact for its
“possibility” (148, c.). This is the subjective “moment”, here shown as not
dependent on affirmation of man as man (man or “character”, he seems to say,
though man as character equally calls man as man in question) but within
dialectical Reason alone. The existence of Activity is a consciousness, a
differentiation, since a knowing. If the computer knows, it is conscious, whether
or not we add “It is not conscious, therefore...” Such “consciousness” however
need not be interpreted in the narrowly psychologistic sense. On the other hand
the notion of “intentional systems” would need modification before incorporation
into an absolute idealism, where the knowledge is utlimately self-knowedge as
including all (the sense of the Delphic response to Socrates, i.e. to philosophy, in
Hegel's interpretation).

There is thus much more to Necessity than a mere “union of possibility and
actuality”, which leaves everything open. Necessity “is the notion itself”, in some
nearer sense than that in which everything is this. We have to rise beyond
“actualities”, the category thereof. These are “forms only, collapsing and
transient”, however much they may seem to satisfy us in this mere moment
which we have reached. “Deeper in and further up”, thought as it were exhorts.
We proceed.
In 148 Hegel refers back to these three elements “in the process of Necessity”,
Condition, Fact, and the Activity, conscious, as he has remarked, of the greater
difficulty now attending our reading. We may wonder why or how it is a
“process”. They “constitute” necessity, he also says.

“The Condition is (a) what is pre-supposed or ante-stated, i.e. it is not only

supposed or stated.” It is not, that is, only a correlative to the fact but also prior,”
even “independent”. It is “a contingent and external circumstance which exists
without respect to the fact.” This must be read in the light of his earlier
exposition of the Condition. This “term” though, pre-supposed and “ante-stated”,
is equally a (or the?) “complete circle of conditions”, the “external” world as it is,
we might say, using Hegel’s term.

These or this “are passive, are used as materials for the fact”, “used up” as he
also says repeatedly, “into the content of which they thus enter”, as the
manifestation which necessity, the notion, is, we might also say (to ourselves),
thinking of previous moments in this discourse of the dialectic.

The Fact, now, “is also (a) something pre-supposed or ante-stated”, whether to
the Condition or the Activity or both is as yet unclear. A purely reciprocal
correlation with the Condition(s) seems denied. Yet it too, we go on to read, is
“prior and independent”. Yet this is called “a process”, even if not as such
temporal. Thus “at first” the Fact, as “supposed”, is “only inner and possible, and
also, being prior, an independent content by itself”, i.e. it is not, like the
Condition, “a contingent and external circumstance”. It is “inner”. Again, by
“using up” (they use or use up one another) “the conditions, it receives its
external existence”, this Fact which was at first only inner, realising “the
determinations1 of its content”. These do indeed “reciprocally correspond to the
conditions”. The fact both “presents itself out of these as the fact” and “also
proceeds from them”, i.e. at the same time as it is pre-supposed and ante-stated
to them. The mutual identity, beyond reciprocal implication, of Inner and Outer, is
here confirmed.

Even the Activity, or third “element”, “has an independent existence of its own
(as a man, a character)”, although “possible only where the conditions are and
the fact”, i.e. along with them in what is, we shall see and have seen, necessity.
“It is the movement which translates the conditions into fact, and the latter into
the former as the side of existence”. It is in fact, again, subjectivity, thought,
though Hegel does not yet say this, of particular or universal self indifferently.
The movement “educes the fact from the conditions in which it is potentially
present.” It “gives existence to the fact.” It does this “by abolishing the existence
possessed by the conditions” (my emphasis). This refers, I do not doubt, to the
“upward spring of the mind” outlined at 50. In itself it “signifies”, i.e. the actual
spring signifies, “that the being which the world has is only a semblance” and
that “truth abides in God”, in that in which “we live and move and have our
being”, to take a leaf out of the scripture. The world is the external, the alienated
Idea.

1
Wallace has ”articles”.
“In so far as these three elements stand to each other in the shape of
independent existences,” the world, its being so, the subject, “this process has
the aspect of an outward necessity.” It is not, it is implied, the whole story.
“Outward necessity has a limited content for its fact”, “this whole in the shape of
singleness”. The limitedness, however, is so to say formal rather than material. It
arises “logically” “since in its form this whole is external to itself”. It is “self-
externalised even in its own self and in its content.” Any such world, as
“externalised”, would be limited in virtue of just this externalisation. This is what
Hegel means surely by self- or intrinsically externalised. The externality itself as
such “is a limit of its content.” This is the inward rationale of contingency within
ultimate necessity as the Notion. It is not, except immediately or “vulgarly”, the
“empirical” barrier at which ultimate necessity stops, in contradiction of itself,
such that “Either man exists or God exists” (Sartre). Necessity is, i.e. God knows
all things since this knowledge is prior to and not “caused” by them. Hegel simply
fills in the Augustinian-Thomist and arguably Aristotelian tradition here. Here, at
least, his thought coincides with the teaching of divine creation as necessarily
finite, even though he will also speak of it as an entire manifestation. There too
he mirrors the distinct “processions” of Word, internal but also “external” in
“incarnation”, and creature, dis-covering a foundation of necessity for what in
religion is represented as contingent (as Aquinas or Augustine stressed with the
felix culpa) in the spirit of the thought of Duns Scotus on this point.

What is brought out here is a necessary connection between time and necessity,
revealed immediately in the past-present structure. By becoming past things,
events, are revealed as necessary. It was fated to be, we say, meaning that, as
now complete, it not merely cannot but could not, i.e. as complete, be otherwise.
Refutations of “fatalism” turn upon just this point. Fatalism, however, in some
statements of it, is not the sound doctrine of Necessity that is ultimately one with
freedom.

So it is, moreover, with facts, therefore dependent upon the Condition(s) as

described above. The fact is what has become, even where it is an apparently
timeless definition such as that man is an animal. We thus suppose a stage of
becoming what something is, whether or not such a stage has occurred. Thus
God exists, completely, i.e. completedly, as result, says Hegel. This has to be
perceived and that is the Activity, ultimately of absolute self-perception.

This is in general reflected in Aristotle's term for essence, coined before the
medieval abstract term, namely, that which was to be, ti en einai, quod erat
esse. In so far as time becomes fact, therefore, it is no longer perceptible as time,
as condition. The upward spring has been made. The causal relation there
becomes reversible exactly as instanced in the relation between Condition and
Fact here and this will be further gone into under the category of Causality,
coming after Substance. Time's arrow is indeed reversible (Boltzmann) but then it
is no longer that arrow we had been calling time.

He thought he saw a bank-clerk descending from a bus,

He looked again and found it was a hippopotamus.

This indeed, Necessity, is that true and final Leviathan glimpsed, differently, by
the author of Job or by Thomas Hobbes, which we see, not underneath any and
every phenomenon or immediacy, but when we “look again”, as the poet-logician
here intimates.

**************************************’’’

Hegel sums up (149). Necessity is in itself (an sich) “the one essence... but now
full of content, in the reflected light of which its distinctions take the form of
independent realities.” Distinctions now are logical as “independent realities” are
not, i.e. that is the distinction, the separation rather, we normally make. Here, in
absolute idealism, in the dialectic which issues in absolute idealism (it is not
anteriorly presupposed), they come together, are revealed as being one and the
same. Necessity is “self-same” or same all the way through, we might first
interpret. Thus it both has “the form of independent realities” and is “absolute
form”, essence. As such it is activity, “the activity which reduces into
dependency (e.g. the conditions) and mediates into immediacy” (my stress).

“Whatever is necessary is through another”. In this light, causality, Hume

identified and questioned it, giving reasons malgré lui, as he admits, since
reasons remain themselves causes, the inner the outer and vice versa. “What is
the world without reason?” (var. “the reason”) Gottlob Frege would later ask. 2
This other, anyhow, before a trio of constituents and now a “through” (it is the
same), is a “breaking up” into Fact, Activity and Condition, “an intermediate
actuality or accidental circumstance”. We may call it either. So, being thus
“through”, the necessary “is not in and for itself”, just yet, but hypothetical, he
says, “a mere result of assumption” (of a “necessary connection”). “But this
intermediation is just as immediately however the abrogation of itself”. It, the
fact, closes with itself, somewhat as we indicated above, when discussing the
necessary contingency of the Outward. This “contingent condition”, as ground,
translates into immediacy, i.e. immediate necessity, lifting up the dependency
upon the other two constituents of “the process”, into actuality, our present
larger concern (142).

“In this return to itself the necessary simply and positively is, as unconditioned
actuality.” Hegel, we may or might think, is simply asking or compelling us to
recognise what stands close before us but needs to be seen in the mirror which is
reflection, like the nose on our faces. Mediated through circumstances, necessity
is yet unmediated, “closer than I am to myself” if I think of the activity
particularly. This will become clearer. Again, it is the undeniable, not such or
merely that or as if Hegel foists upon us now a maybe unwelcome positive thesis
in “cosmology”, but the undeniable as the undeniable, viz. Necessity, from which
all thought has to start. And thus it is thought itself that has brought us to this
and not, except in second place, some individual philosopher. Thus we are
engaged with a text, its import for us, and not with a man or individual, ruined in
essence.
2
Frege is frequently supposed in the Anglo-American camp to have been an anti-idealist
or realist. Writings of Hans Sluga and others, this citation from The Foundations of
Arithmetic apart, seem to me to well document the contrary.
*********************************************’

The Zusats to 147 provides us with some final, indeed more “cosmological”
considerations upon Necessity:

When anything is said to be necessary, the first question we ask is,

Why? Anything necessary accordingly comes before us as something
due to a supposition, the result of certain antecedents. If we go no
further than mere derivation from antecedents however, we have not
gained a complete notion of what necessity means.

This would be his criticism of Hume.

What is merely derivative, is what it is, not through itself, but through
something else; and in this way too it is merely contingent. What is
necessary, on the other hand, we would have to be what it is through
itself; and thus, although derivative, it must still contain the
antecedent whence it is derived as a vanishing element in itself.

How “vanishing”? It is absorbed, in the “ingratitude” of Spirit, the Activity which

is itself constituent of Necessity. Of this, “It is,” we say. “We thus hold it to be
simple self-relation, in which all dependence on something else is removed.” Nor
is there, therefore, some further end. In this sense necessity is called blind. He
speaks again of “the process of necessity” as beginning “with the existence of
scattered circumstances”. One recalls the treatment of Atomism in the Doctrine
of Being. These are “an immediate actuality which collapses”, a new actuality
proceeding. One recalls the “upward spring of the mind” from 50, insofar as
Activity, having “an independent existence of its own (as a man, a character)”
(148) is involved. There are thus two ways of seeing this now “doubled” Content,
as “final realised fact” or as these scattered circumstances “positively” or
positivistically viewed, though this “is nought”, is “inverted into its negative, thus
becoming content of the realised fact.” The dialectical striving towards result is
at work here, how we think it duplicating or identified with how it is brought
about. Implied, in contemporary terms, is a reconciliation of the mechanistic and
the teleological accounts of reality. Yet it is the former which is “absorbed”. The
immediate circumstances become “conditions” in the reciprocal sense outlined
above, being “retained as content of the ultimate reality” (my stress). This,
McTaggart will claim, is timeless immortality, without beginning or end, necessity
in fact, which can however only apply to or be born by persons. All else, unable to
be a condition in this sense, is “misperception” (or outside which is inside, we
might rather say). Hegel, however, speaks of “circumstances and conditions” (my
stress) here.

Yet in “teleological action, we have in the end of action a content which is

already fore-known”, “not blind but seeing”. This he identifies as rule by
Providence, where “absolutely pre-determined” design “is the active principle”,
“fore-known and fore-willed”. The priority, we know, is logical rather than
temporal.
Necessity and providence, he goes on, “are not mutually excluding” but have the
same “intellectual principle”, viz. the notion, “the truth of necessity”. Yet
necessity itself “is the notion implicit”. It is no “blind fatalism” that seeks to
“understand the necessity of every event.” He refers here to the philosophy of
history as a Theodicy just inasmuch as investigating such necessity. Nothing, that
is, escapes this Logic as “empirical”, “contingent” or whatever. Will and
accomplishment are absolutely identical. Man, “in his difference from God”, is not
absolute. Here we see the folly of speaking of Hegel’s “pantheism”. We have to
transcend ourselves, actively.

******************************************************’’

In speaking here of Man as something yet actual “in his difference from God”,
although not absolutely so, however, Hegel touches upon the question of an
Analogy of Being. More usually he eschews or avoids this approach or way of
speaking in his texts, his basic axiom, or one of them, being rather that
“Everything finite is false”, in line here with the mystical tradition or, rather, the
concurrence of mystical and philosophical writers on this point, particularly of the
Platonic school. Within this school, however, Aristotle, remarking that Being “is
said in many ways”, prepared the way for the medieval division on this point,
even though Aristotle arrives at the end of the Metaphysics at the position we
find, mutatis mutandis, in Hegel on this point of the relation, which is non-
relation, of the Absolute to things finite.

So Thomas Aquinas takes up Aristotle’s explanation of this analogia in terms of

the different proportion (ratio) of God to God’s act of being, from which his
essence or conception is not separate, and of finite things to their acts of being
(actus essendi). Duns Scotus, in the next generation, says he knows nothing of
(nescio) or does not know any such “act”, as distinct from the act which is
essence or what a (given) thing is (essentia). There are many variants upon this,
for example in the interpretation of Cajetan’s (sixteenth century) commentaries,
deeply affected by the terminology at least of the by then far more numerous
and influential Scotist school, upon Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and more
especially of his treatise “On the Analogy of Names” (De analogia nominum).3

For Scotus the concept of being is necessarily univocal, not analogical. Indeed the
controversy extends to asking whether analogy applies to words or concepts or
both. It is generally applied to concepts and there the dispute becomes whether
it is only a logical but also a metaphysical doctrine. In this latter sense there is,
nowadays, an increasingly insistent claim that there is ontological discontinuity
between the being of God and the being of creatures, which are nonetheless both
3
This title seems to imply that analogy is a logical doctrine rather than a metaphysical
theory of Being. Thus the contemporary Thomist Ralph McInerny interprets it, arguing
from Thomas’s and other texts. Viewed thus though it has a continuity with the practice
in theology of determining what it is correct to say merely, thus reducing the doctrine’s
interest for any thorough-going philosophy such as Hegel’s. The point, however, for
Thomas was that he felt that one could not say anything correctly about God (a point
criticised by Hegel, at least regarding some uses made of such negative theology) and
hence pleaded for analogy.
real. This though is little more than a religious refusal to engage in just those
thought-processes which Hegel works through in his Logic and elsewhere. It is a
general abdication or a plea to be allowed to take philosophy, which, like being,
“has no parts” (Parmenides), piecemeal, usually appealing to “mystery”. Mystery,
however, is just what such religious rationalism, in the negative sense, refuses to
acknowledge or live with, namely, that in the face of the absolute or except as
identified with it we “both are and are not”, are one with our Other or not-self.

Kant had already pointed away from this impotence of analogy in speaking not of
man but of “the rational creature”. Hume, after all, had already relativised
language about the finite Self. Thus far, though sceptical as to an Absolute, he is
in line with Catherine of Siena’s report, “I am he who is, you are she who is not.”
In this discussion of Hegel’s the matter is touched upon while treating of a
determining divine or absolute knowledge. This too, mutatis mutatis is a theme of
Aquinas, on necessarily absolute omniscience, and uneasiness about it, in
relation to human freedom, lay behind much later theological disagreement,
Calvinists finding comfort in the Dominican position that God necessarily makes
our actions free and as such “pre”-determines them. Against this were pitted the
Jesuit and related doctrines of Molinism, scientia media and so on, concerning
which the Pope of the day refused, in the early seventeenth century, to make a
decision in so far as it affected confessional theology. No one knows if the Jesuits
would have listened anyway and it is this school of “humanistic” thought,
embodied in Suarez, which came to Kant via Wolff and others. It includes, as part
of its indifferentist notion of freedom, the idea of a libertas indifferentiae as
essential to our free choice which is therefore independent even of God, this
being thought necessary by the pious for God to “judge” us. In effect, God is
reduced to one among a plurality of actors and thus the way is prepared for
formal atheism. This is the background to Hegel’s distinctive remarks on ethical
matters, at which many have professed to be scandalised or at least puzzled. It is
quite clear that Hegel is in line with the Dominican and Thomist school on these
matters. Whether this is through having studied them or independently or both is
a question for the historians of thought. He is certainly well versed in earlier texts
as common patrimony of all the parties.

Regarding determining absolute knowledge, Hegel claims to show the identity of

freedom and Destiny or Fate, as this was anciently understood. Against this
background he criticises as less noble the “modern” insistence, which he
effectively finds neurotic, on renouncing “only in prospect of compensation”.
Destiny “leaves no room for consolation” and consolation is his subject here. We
need have no “sense of bondage” to Destiny. This modern point of view, “that of
Consolation”, nonetheless derives from Christianity and is a viewpoint which, he
will show, when rightly understood is superior. No room is left for consolation and
yet, via the revelation of divine or absolute Subjectivity, the Christian religion is
one of “absolute Consolation”. He cites the text “God wills that all men be saved”
which troubled Augustine so much, but he does not follow Augustine’s talk of an
antecedent and a consequent will. What God wills not merely is accomplished but
is and is what is. “That teaching declares that subjectivity has an infinite value.”
So Hegel both eschews consolation and declares that the Christian consolation is
absolute. He is in striking accord with Thérèse Martin, known as the saint of
Lisieux, who declared “My only consolation is to have none”, the classical
mystical doctrine of the “Dark Night of the Soul” (title of a work by John of the
Cross, a Spanish Carmelite friar).4 He thus overcomes the unreflected antithesis
between pagan resignation and Christian consolation. Some people are surprised
at his deigning to treat at all of the “soft” subject of consolation. It forms the
necessary pendant, however, to his superficially “hard” doctrine of necessity. He
claims to present the consolations of necessity itself as he establishes it here.

Any “sense of bondage” to Destiny “springs from inability to surmount the

antithesis”, from seeing what is as contrary to what ought to be. We may again
surmise a Humean background here. In fact, if one says God is implied in there
being any world at all, i.e. not via a demonstration of a particular design, then
this “abstract” ought is already overthrown. In this same sense Aquinas places
the absolute good of God and the happiness (beatitude) that God is, as finis
ultimus of all, above the purely ethical or “honourable” good (bonum honestum)
which only derives its absoluteness from its being needed in the form of virtues
necessary for this other and final end. This, as an intrinsic necessity, is not
understood in the Utilitarian way. Happiness, rather, is itself höchste Entfaltung
der Sittlichkeit (Martin Grabmann) and happiness, it is argued, just is in itself
transcendent. All things in fact participate in this end, interpreting participation,
however, as the absorption and negation Hegel describes.5

Because it is, it ought to be, Hegel thus argues. “All shall be well and all manner
of thing”, one might recall from a third lady thinker (Julian of Norwich), keeping in
the background Boethius’ assertions of, specifically, the consolations of “the lady
Philosophy”. In face of reality there is, finally, “no contrast, no bondage, no pain,
no sorrow”, and this attitude, it is true, is “void of consolation”. But, again, “it is a
frame of mind which does not need consolation.” That’s the consolation of it.

b.) Hegel speaks now of Subjectivity. It is “personal subjectivity” as having

“acquired its infinite significance” which gives rise to what we might call these
hang-ups of “the Christian world”. Christian or not, we live in a Christian or “post-
Christian” world, whether we talk about the French Revolution or the United
Nations. It is also a Greco-Roman and Jewish world. It is also an increasingly
Chinese world. Hegel speaks first of natural and finite Subjectivity, having
contingent and arbitrary private interests. This is “all that we call person” and not
“thing” or the non-personal. In contrast to this obstinate pursuit of subjective
aims, he says, one cannot but admire “the tranquil resignation of the ancients to
destiny”. It seems “higher and worthier”, more “religious”, we might almost say.

“But the term subjectivity is not to be confined merely to the bad and finite kind
of it which is contrasted with the thing (fact).” Really it is “immanent in the fact”,
4
It is by the way striking that Hegel somewhere mentions “Spanish poetry” as a possible
distraction from the “task” of philosophy. John’s work consists in a commentary on his
own profound poems.
5
Cf. Especially 142 Zus., final paragraph.
as we have seen above in the treatment of Activity. Thus infinite it “is the very
truth of the fact”. Here Hegel’s reasoning coincides in its conclusion with his
picture of the Christian God as Absolute, but that is a circumstance not intrinsic
to the reasoning itself so is no objection to it, prejudices apart. The doctrine of
consolation, anyway, here “receives a newer and a higher significance”,
according to which “the Christian religion is to be regarded as the religion of
consolation and even of absolute consolation.” Here he cites the Pauline
“universalist” text from the Epistle to Timothy, a first-century episkopos or
overseer of a community of Christians. This text was later made canonical and so
Hegel claims that Christianity “teaches” what it declares, “that subjectivity has
an infinite value”. This “consoling power of Christianity just lies in the fact that
God Himself is in it known as the absolute subjectivity”, as self of myself he
might have said, echoing Augustine. For “inasmuch as subjectivity involves the
element of particularity”, of differentiation, no doubt itself infinite if it
characterises “God”, or the Infinite and Absolute, “our particular personality too
is recognised not merely as something to be solely and simply nullified, but as at
the same time as something to be preserved.” This says, in effect, that it is
nullified, yet it is preserved. He does not and need not say how.

By contrast the ancient gods, he says, “do not know themselves, are only known”
as personifications. So they themselves are powerless before destiny, thus seen
as after all blind. But the Christian God “is also self-knowing”, “absolutely actual”
therefore. As so often in Hegel, we suddenly feel that he is but uncovering the
obvious. Each man, however, he goes on, is “the architect of his own fortune”, as
we can see once we shake off the miasma of a blind necessity, as opposed to the
all-seeing, omniscient necessity of Providence. All comes from the self. Hence the
oracular advice, “Know thyself” was not restrictive or constraining in the sense of
restraining, but all sufficient, opening up more deeply reflected vistas moreover.
To blame circumstances is “unfreedom”. Whatever happens to a man “is only the
outcome of himself”. “No doubt too there is a great deal of chance in what befalls
us” but this chance, Hegel declares, “has its ‘root’ in the natural man”. We might
take this as a variant upon the idea that pure chance is only real at the
phenomenal level, actually finding a strict causal explanation among things “not
intended” (the view offered in Aristotle’s Physics). Yet Hegel seems to be offering
a more anthropological view, in the sense of concern with the subject, borrowing
from or almost hijacking the theological perspectives of natural and
“supernatural” in order to press home the absolute requirement of self-
transcendence in order for man to be man, as knowing himself identified with
“absolute” perspectives, self in other, in Otherness itself, the truth of knowledge.
Thus he concludes by saying that our “view of necessity” determines our destiny
itself. It is “at the root of the content and discontent of men”.