Who I am, then, depends on what I actually do, as well as on how my actions and perceptions are recognized by others. To see the color blue it is not enough that I take myself to be seeing the color blue, and to be a friend it is not enough that I take myself to be a friend. In trying to see something, I have to take myself to be seeing something (blue), but I can be mistaken about what I am seeing. Likewise, in trying to be someone, I have to take myself to be someone (a friend), but I can be mistaken about who I am and fail to be a friend.
The possibility of such mistakes and failures is what Hegel calls the “negativity” of self-consciousness. Every act of self-consciousness (even the most immediate perception) has the form of a commitment that may be contested, revised, or negated in some other way. This negativity characterizes even our deepest self-relation. Being a person is not something that can be achieved once and for all, but a purposive activity that must be sustained and is vulnerable to breaking down. As Hegel emphasizes, however, such “negativity” should not be understood as simply negative, since it is equally a positive and indispensable part of what it means to be someone for whom something matters. If there were no fragility built into your self-consciousness—if it were simply given who you are and what you see—there would be nothing at stake for you in doing anything.
Hegel’s insight regarding the form of self-consciousness can thus be understood in terms of secular faith. The fundamental form of self-consciousness (“I think”) should not be conceived on the model of possessing theoretical, contemplative knowledge but on the model of sustaining a practical commitment (“I believe”). To hold a belief—all the way from a belief about what I perceive to a belief about who I am—is not reducible to being in a state of mind. Rather, to hold a belief is to make a commitment with which I have to keep faith. By the same token, I have to hold myself open to the possible contestation of my beliefs and the fragility of my self-conception. Who I am cannot be immediately given or finally established, but must be embodied in my practices and depends on the recognition of others, who may challenge my conception of what I have done and who I am.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel explicitly connects his notion of self-consciousness with a new understanding of the relation between the Enlightenment and Faith (his umbrella term for various forms of religious faith).63 On the one hand, Hegel agrees with the general Enlightenment critique of religious faith, which maintains that there is no God—or any other form of infinite agent—in the universe. Our notions of what is good and just (our norms) are neither legislated by any God nor by properties of the universe itself. Rather, our norms are instituted through our practices and do not exist independently of us. On the other hand, Hegel argues against a notion of the Enlightenment that reduces the status of norms to subjective attitudes and the pursuit of particular interests. While our norms are not given by God or Nature, their authority is not merely subjective, since our own attitudes and interests are formed by socially shared practices from the beginning. For us to have any sense of what counts as good and just in the first place, these norms must be enacted in how we are treated as persons (how we are recognized by others) and how we hold one another accountable for what we do.
In traditions of religious faith, Hegel sees an implicit acknowledgment of the primacy of practice. Through congregational worship, edifying instruction, and social services, a religious community institutes a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just—while bestowing a sense of dignity on its individual members. An instructive example is the African American Christian tradition out of which King emerged, which places great emphasis on building a community of mutual respect, support, and interaction. By going to church regularly and participating in congregational expressions of devotion (singing, praying, praising) a sense of community is created, which in turn serves as a platform for social organizing.
Such a community can be a source of strength and positive social recognition, but it can also be debilitating and repressive. Already in King’s lifetime, there were important critiques of the religious roots of the civil rights movement. Ella Baker and other feminist activists in the movement took issue with the tradition of authoritarian leadership, the subordination of women, and the conservative notions of the nuclear family, which were part of the Southern religious tradition that King inherited.64 The capacity to criticize and transform such legacies proceeds from the secular recognition that we are responsible for the norms that we sustain through our practices. We never start from the beginning—we always inherit a tradition that tells us what we ought to do—but it is not given how we should take up the tradition in question. We do not merely have a sense of what we ought to do (a given norm); we also have the capacity to ask ourselves if we ought to do what we supposedly ought to do. This double ought structure is at the heart of what I have called our spiritual freedom. In Hegel’s terms, we are not simply conscious of what we do but self-conscious of being answerable for what we do and thereby capable of questioning the principles of our practices.
For Hegel, the important task is to build institutional practices that acknowledge and enable us to cultivate our spiritual freedom. The problem with religious forms of faith, then, is that they ultimately disown our spiritual freedom. In order to engage the question of who we should be and what we should do, we must recognize that we ourselves produce the communal norms that we seek to defend, critique, or transform. Religious forms of faith, by contrast, restrict our ability to own the responsibility for the form of life that we institute through our practices. In the last instance, the responsibility for what counts as good and just is disowned, since it is delegated to an independently existing God.
In Hegel’s account, the self-understanding of religious believers is therefore at odds with their own practical activity. The actual object of devotion in the practice of faith is the community itself. The Christian Trinity is not an independently existing reality but a pictorial representation of the structure of the community of believers. “God” is a name for the self-legislated communal norms (the principles to which the congregation holds itself); “Christ” is a name for the social actors who sustain the norms through their embodied practices; and “the Holy Spirit” is a name for the institutional relations of the Church through which the norms are actualized. By going to church and worshipping together, the members of the congregation bring into being a form of spiritual life: they hold one another responsible, treat one another as committed, and acknowledge one another’s personal dignity.
Such mutual dependence is at the heart of any form of spiritual life, which must be developed and sustained through social practices of recognition that are materially embodied. The religious community, however, does not understand its own activity to be an end in itself. Rather, the individual members take the religious community to be a means for the end of serving an independently existing God and earning a salvation that transcends the fragility of the shared congregational life. The object of religious faith—whether God or any other form of infinite being—is ultimately regarded as separable from the practice of faith, since it does not depend on any form of finite life.
In contrast, Hegel’s understanding of faith is secular in my sense of the term. He seeks to make us recognize that the object of our faith is inseparable from the practice of faith. The end to which we are devoted is our life together—our only life—and not any otherworldly beyond.
We can thus understand why Hegel gives such importance to the Christian notion of the incarnation. The conclusion to the Phenomenology of Spirit hinges on the difference between Hegel’s philosophical concept of the incarnation and what he describes as the religious understanding.65 Through the incarnation, the object of faith—God—is recognized as materially embodied and fragile. Yet, from a religious standpoint, the incarnation of God in mortal life is a secondary historical event. God himself in his Trinity is eternal and immutable. At o
ne point in time he becomes a human being in the form of Jesus, but that incarnate form is temporary in relation to his eternal being as Christ. When he exists as Jesus on earth, he is subject to hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain, anxiety, and death, but no such limitations afflict Christ in the eternal Trinity.
For Hegel, by contrast, fragile material embodiment is an originary and necessary condition for any form of spiritual life. What the incarnation means is not that God becomes man at a moment in historical time, but that every form of spiritual life must be born and is subject to death. The life-defining norms to which we hold ourselves (God) can exist only by being embodied in our practices as individual social actors (Christ), who can live on and be recognized for who we are only through the institutional relations that we share (the Holy Spirit).
The tripartite structure is the key to Hegel’s secular reading of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What Hegel calls spirit (Geist) is not something separate from its material conditions but comes into being as a form of life that can die. A spiritual life is never eternal and can live on only through the social practices that sustain it. For the same reason, resurrection is not an event of salvation, but the form in which we live on as individuals through the spiritual life that we share. The religious understanding of Jesus pictures the resurrection as a historical event that leads to the overcoming of finitude and the salvation of eternal life. For Hegel, on the contrary, the only form of resurrection is the way an individual is recognized and commemorated by a community. A community can enable an individual to live on in memory, but the community itself is fragile and depends on the commitments we maintain.
Accordingly, Hegel argues that the defining feature of spiritual life is the burial of the dead. By commemorating an individual through the act of burial, we recognize in practice that material and spiritual life are inseparable but distinguishable. On the one hand, the act of burial acknowledges that the spiritual life of a person is absolutely lost with the loss of her material life. The one who was leading her life is irredeemably gone and that is why we mourn. To understand that she is dead—that she no longer exists for herself—is to understand that spiritual life is inseparable from material life. On the other hand, the act of burial acknowledges that the spiritual life of a person is distinguishable from her material life. As Hegel puts it, to commemorate someone through the act of burial is to express a commitment that “the individual’s ultimate being shall not belong solely to Nature.”66 Even though the “particular material elements”67 of the deceased body are disintegrating, we can still remember and honor the dead person as the unique individual she was. We do not merely acquiesce to death as a natural event, but maintain our spiritual fidelity to the dead person. Rather than simply register that she is dead, we affirm that she ought to live on in our memory and that we ought to suffer the pain of mourning her death.
Through the act of burial we recognize the normative standing of the deceased as a member of our community and affirm that she is an end in herself, who deserves our devotion even when she no longer can contribute to our life together. In Hegel’s language, the act of burial confirms “the right of subjectivity” to be recognized. In burying the dead, we acknowledge that our society is not an independent whole but composed of singular social individuals, whose lives are irreplaceable and unrepeatable. By explicitly marking and commemorating the absence of the dead, we avow that we are not self-sufficient but essentially related to those who have come before us and those who will come after us. Our spiritual life together depends on the projection of the past into the future, which will always remain precarious. The past can live on through our commitments and our social practices, but the movement of living on itself depends on the material support of spiritual life.
The act of burial is a retrospective recognition of material and spiritual life as distinguishable but inseparable. The same recognition, however, is at work prospectively for anyone who understands herself as an individual agent. To lead my life, my spiritual commitments must be distinguishable from my material life. If I merely followed the requirements of my material life, I would not be intelligible as an individual person with commitments of my own. For my life to be recognized as mine, the question of what is worth doing with my life must be at issue for me. I must be able to risk my life and ask myself if I ought to prioritize my survival. If my life were not at risk, I could not value my life, since my life would simply be given and not subject to loss. My ability to affirm that my life is worth living—as well as my ability to affirm that something is worth more than my life—presupposes that my life is something that I can risk for the sake of something that I value.
The ability to risk my life is therefore a condition of possibility for my agency. To value anything and express a commitment of my own, I cannot simply follow the demands of my material life but must be able to put my life at stake and engage the question of what is worth prioritizing. In this precise sense, my spiritual freedom is distinguishable from my material life. For the same reason, however, my spiritual freedom is inseparable from my material life. In risking my life, I cannot be indifferent to my material life and I cannot treat it as inessential to who I am. On the contrary, it is because I value my material life as essential to who I am—because I understand that my spiritual life is inseparable from my material life—that the risk of my life is intelligible as a risk. Religious martyrs cannot actually sacrifice their lives from the standpoint of their faith, since they believe that their material death will lead to their eternal life. Only from the standpoint of secular faith—only from the standpoint of holding ourselves to be essentially mortal and inherently valuable as mortal beings—can we sacrifice our lives for the sake of something that matters more to us than our own survival.
By the same token, it is only from the standpoint of secular faith that we can recognize “the right of subjectivity” that belongs to each one of us. To recognize anything as rightfully belonging to you—to recognize anything as being your own—I must grasp that you are not self-sufficient and that you depend on a material life. Likewise, for any one of us to make anything our own, we must recognize that our lives are at stake in what we do and that we will lose everything (including ourselves) in death.
The prospect of our own death is a matter of what Hegel calls “absolute fear.”68 The fear of our own death is “absolute” because it is not fear of a specific object or subject but fear of losing the very ability to experience any objects or subjects—the fear of losing our own subjectivity. In absolute fear, the subject and the object of fear are identical, since we fear that our own being will cease to be. As Hegel puts it in a striking passage, it is only because we are “infected all the way through” and “shaken to the core”69 by absolute fear that we can have any sense of our own individuality and be engaged in the project of trying to make our lives our own.
Hegel’s notion of absolute fear can thus be understood in terms of what I have analyzed as anxiety before death. As I argued at length in chapter 4, anxiety before death is not reducible to a psychological, anthropological, or biological phenomenon. Rather, anxiety before death is a condition of intelligibility for spiritual freedom. Only through the anxiety of being finite can someone ask herself what is worth doing with her life—what is worth prioritizing—and thereby make something her own.
Accordingly, Hegel maintains that spiritual life can be what it is only in and through its relation to death. “Death,” Hegel writes, “is the most worthy of fear, and holding onto the dead requires the greatest force.”70 Yet only by facing death—and holding on to the dead through the movement of living on—can the life of spirit come into its own:
The life of spirit is not a life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures devastation and maintains itself in it. Spirit wins its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. Spirit is this power not as the positive
which looks away from the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or false, and then—being done with it—move on to something else. Rather, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it.71
To lead a spiritual life is always to live in relation to the possibility of devastation and death. We can become ill or disabled. Our loved ones may leave us or be taken away from us. Projects to which we devote our lives can fail, and we ourselves may break the integrity to which we hold ourselves. Moreover, the standard of integrity to which we hold ourselves can be called into question—either by ourselves or by others—and the lives we have tried to lead can come to be seen as a waste of our time. In short, who we take ourselves to be and anything to which we are committed can be negated, leaving us devastated and—in the last instance—dead. As Hegel makes clear, such “negativity” (the ever-present possibility of negation and loss) cannot be dismissed as inessential but must be recognized as an essential part of any form of spiritual life. The risk of “absolute dismemberment” is intrinsic to why it matters that we keep anything together. Without the possibility of failure the very notion of success would be unintelligible and without the possibility of death the very form of life—the form of self-maintenance—would have no purpose.
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