Not just a metaphor : Hegel's God and the normativity of metaphysics

From the 1795 essay “The Life of Jesus” to the work on the proofs for the existence of God for which Hegel signed a contract shortly before his death in 1831,1 religion in general, and God in particular, remained at the core of Hegel’s philosophical speculation. There is no shortage of scholarly works on Hegel’s philosophy of religion. And yet, the debate about the status that should be attributed to Hegel’s God seems to not have progressed much since the early disputes between the “right” and the “left” Hegelians. The main aim of God and the Self in Hegel was to provide a contribution to such debate, hopefully shedding some light on some of the most controversial issues. God and the Self in Hegel explores the consequences that Hegel’s idea of God has for his understanding of an idealistically conceived metaphysics—that is, metaphysics considered as a discipline in which reason is concerned with its own products, and providing a fundamentally normative content. Such a conception of metaphysics can be regarded to be the central tenet of the qualified revisionist interpretation of Hegel, advanced by scholars such as Beatrice Longuenesse and Paul Redding. My own contribution to this interpretative stream—and one that, I contend, is crucial to clarify the status of God for Hegel—is the addition of a further qualification: metaphysical knowledge as mediated objectivity, by which I mean an objectivity that does not regard objects as distinct from and opposed to human consciousness, but takes into account the contribution of the self-conscious mind for the establishment of the content of that metaphysical object. Hegel wants to restore content to religion, but the objectivity of God is a mediated objectiv¬ity. If God is understood as mediately objective, it is possible, I argue, to think of God as the source of norms and to conceive of those norms as resulting from the recognitive activity of human beings without contradiction.