ABSTRACT
Chapter 13 by Paul Redding deals with Hegel’s actualist metaphysics as a framework for understanding his recognition-theoretic account of Christianity. Despite the fact that Hegel’s theory of recognition is standardly discussed in relation to his social and political philosophy, the most developed account of recognition to be found in his Phenomenology of Spirit occurs in the discussion of a form of religious inter-subjectivity based on the dynamics of confession and forgiveness. Redding argues that the recognitive relation is at the heart of Hegel’s account of modern Christianity, the theology of which in turn has to be understood in relation to a metaphysical position that, while critical of the idea of any transcendent realm beyond the actual, is also critical of Spinoza’s then-popular naturalist and pantheist version of actuality. Redding claims that we might better understand Hegel’s alternative to Spinoza by comparing his metaphysical account of modality to varieties of ‘actualism’ that have recently emerged in reaction to David Lewis’ doctrine of ‘modal realism’. Thus, to counter Spinoza’s necessitarianism, and yet avoid any realm beyond the actual, Hegel aligns with those critics of Lewis’ account of a plurality of ‘possible worlds’. On this ‘actualist’ alternative to Lewis’ possibilism, possibilities should not be conceived as alternate ‘worlds’ that are like the actual world, but as unrealized properties of the actual world itself. But such possibilities are abstracta (for example, sets of consistent propositions), and locating them within the actual, Redding suggests, requires one to recognize other minds as the irreducible loci of such abstract entities. Understood in this way, Hegel’s fundamentally ‘recognitive’ understanding of mind (spirit) complements his ‘this-worldly’ metaphysics, and underpins his distinctive Trinitarian conception of the nature of modern Christianity.
