Hegel's God: How We Know It, and

Why It Deserves to be Called 'God'

 (delivered at a University of Sydney conference, 2007)

Robert M. Wallace

abstract: This paper outlines G.W.F. Hegel’s critique of conventional conceptions of God and
presents his own substitute conception, which makes it clear how we can know a God who is
nevertheless, in an important way, transcendent. The paper also responds to well-known
objections to the “philosophers’ God,” explaining in some detail what
Hegel preserves from conventional conceptions, which justifies him in applying the traditional
name of “God” to what he’s discussing.

It’s well known that various liberal theologians during the last century and a half have wanted to
articulate a conception of God that could satisfy people’s spiritual longings without conflicting
with Darwinian evolution and other well-established scientific discoveries. What’s not well known
is that G.W.F. Hegel already did this, with remarkable power and subtlety, in response to the
great modern skeptics, Hume and Kant. 

Hegel’s philosophy is difficult to access because of his intricate manner of writing, and because
of various misleading rumors that have become attached to his name. Karl Marx claimed that
Hegel was an important influence on Marx’s own thinking, and since Marx was an atheist, many
believers have wanted nothing to do with Marx’s supposed teacher, Hegel. Many scholars
working on Hegel today continue in Marx’s footsteps in that they believe that what’s of value in
Hegel has no significant overlap with the doctrines of traditional religion, or perhaps with what
they call “metaphysics.” Søren Kierkegaard, on the other hand, shared Hegel’s concern about
“God,” but made fun of Hegel for supposedly reducing faith to an arid and impenetrable rational
“system.” The “right Hegelians” who defended Hegel’s philosophical theology weren’t able to
explain it concretely enough to counteract these two lines of critique, and the result has been
that Hegel’s philosophical theology has had rather limited influence down to the present.

The most visible group of Anglophone philosophers advocating Hegel’s relevance today—the
group composed of Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, and Terry Pinkard—has shown no interest
in Hegel’s philosophical theology. Among religious thinkers, Hans Küng, the Catholic theologian,
published a thick book about Hegel. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, admires
Hegel. Slavoj Zizek gaily paraphrases Hegel for numerous purposes. But none of this provides
much access to Hegel’s God for the person in the pew (or the person not in the pew, as the
case may be). In the recent exchanges between religious people and the “new atheists,”
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, I haven’t seen any
mention of Hegel’s conception of God, although it presents a powerful reply to many of the new
atheists’ complaints about what they call “God.”

In this paper I aim to outline Hegel’s central train of thought about God clearly enough so that
you can see how it cuts through many long-running and unnecessary disputes.

Hegel begins with a radical critique of conventional ways of thinking about God. This is his
critique of “spurious infinity.” Hegel provided a condensed and rather impenetrable version of
this critique in Faith and Knowledge,  as early as 1802. He relied on it throughout
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and laid it out in extensive detail in the Science of
Logic (1812). Unfortunately, he didn’t state the critique in simple terms in any of his more
introductory writings, including his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The Encyclopedia
Logic is too condensed to be helpful on this crucial issue, and even its very useful introductory
sections don’t bring the issue into focus. Hegel had a habit of assuming, even in his lectures,
that his readers had already understood the gist of his most important writings, and especially of
the Science of Logic. It was all so clear to him, and had been for so long, that he could no
longer imagine what it would be like to have no clue as to what he was driving at. This state of
affairs, more than anything else, explains the ongoing lack of comprehension of Hegel’s
philosophical theology, and indeed of his “system” as a whole. For of course very few of us have
in fact understood the gist of the Science of Logic, or even of Faith and Knowledge.

So I’ll begin by stating Hegel’s critique of spurious infinity and (thus) of conventional conceptions
of “God.” The critique addresses the common conception of God as a being who is omniscient,
omnipotent, perfectly good, and so forth.[1]  Hegel says that this conception already embodies
a disastrous mistake. The mistake is contained in the first two words: “a being.” If God is to be
truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be “a being,” because “a being,” that is, one being
(however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited
by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think
of God as “a being” is to render God finite. This is the message of Hegel’s critique of “spurious
infinity,” as applied to God. Whatever impressive attributes it may have, nothing that can be
described as “a being” can be truly infinite, nor (consequently) can it be God.

We could think of this critique, by Hegel, of the conception of God as “a being,” as another step
in the long struggle (in religion) against “anthropomorphism” —against our natural tendency to
think of God as like ourselves, only bigger and more powerful. As long as we think of God as
like ourselves in being “a being,” we prevent this “God” from being truly infinite, regardless of
how often we may call this God “infinite.”[2]

If God, then, isn’t “a being,” what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. These are implied
especially in his treatment of (spurious and true) infinity in the Quality chapter of the Science of
Logic. All of Hegel’s later treatments of the divine, whether as the Concept, the Absolute Idea,
or Absolute Spirit, rely crucially on the pattern of thinking that he lays out here. I’ll lay out the
pattern’s full implications for philosophical theology without regard to the details of its
presentation in the various sections of Hegel’s works. For explanation of those details, I invite
you to consult my book.[3]
The first point that Hegel makes is that there is a sense in which finite things like you and me fail
to be as “real” (German: real) as possible, not in the sense that we’re illusions, but in the sense
that we aren’t fully ourselves. What you and I are depends to a large extent on our relations,
both logical and causal, to other finite things. Our location in space and time, our color, weight,
and nationality depend on our relations to other finite things; so do our fears, desires, genes,
and numerous other characteristics that have been implanted in us by what isn’t us. If, by
contrast, there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that
something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more real, as itself. This focus
on being real as oneself will be crucial for everything that follows. It’s what makes it important
for God to be truly infinite: being infinite makes God more himself (herself, itself), and more fully
real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

Hegel’s second, very important point is that this something that’s more real as itself than we are
isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more
real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We’re more real as ourselves
when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make
the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question
like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire
or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through
our thinking about what would be best. But something that can be self-determining in this way,
or even conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more “itself,” more
real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.

Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception
of God that he criticized. God is the fullest reality, achieved through the self-determination of
everything that’s capable of any kind or degree of self-determination. Thus we might say that
God “emerges out of” beings of limited reality, including us. Because God emerges out of us,
God isn’t rendered finite by being a separate being from us.

But this doesn’t mean that God essentially is us, as in Ludwig Feuerbach’s “anthropotheism,” or
that God is Nature, as in Spinoza. God’s emerging out of us and out of nature doesn’t reduce
God to us or to nature, because the God that we’re talking about is more fully real, more real as
itself, than we and nature, in general, are.

Hegel’s picture differs from familiar pictures of something emerging from something else
because rather than some underlying “stuff” that’s simply the paradigm of what’s “real,” what we
have here is a process of increasing reality. Furthermore, we can correctly say that we and
nature receive whatever full reality we possess from Hegel’s God (from “the self-determination
of everything that’s capable of any kind of self-determination”). We get our reality from God,
while God gets his (her, its) freedom from limits, by including us. This mutual relationship
enables us to be intimately connected to God (who isn’t “a separate being” from us, and thus
isn’t limited by us), without being identical to God. God embodies all of our self-determination,
all of our full reality, without embodying our limitations.[4]
This intimate relationship between something that’s less real (us) and something that’s more
real (God), is Hegel’s version of what’s usually called “transcendence.” Please don’t let anyone
tell you that Hegel’s God is “immanent” in the world or nature or anything else. Hegel’s God is
not immanent, because he (she, it) is more fully real than anything else. Hegel has reformulated
transcendence as a kind of emergence, precisely so that it can be true transcendence, rather
than failing, as the “spurious infinity” did, to be transcendent at all.  If like most present-day
writers about Hegel we continue to use the terms “transcendent” and “immanent” in the
conventional way, rather than reconceiving them along the lines of Hegel’s true infinity (where
transcendence is a kind of emergence), we have simply failed to get the point of Hegel’s critique
of spurious infinity. Hegel identifies an intimate connection between us and God, precisely so as
to prevent this “God” from being a spurious infinity, which fails to transcend its relationship of
contrast with us.

Now this intimate connection between us and God, whereby God is the self-determination of
everything that’s capable of self-determination, has another important consequence. Because
we experience this divine self-determination in ourselves, as our stepping back from immediate
urges and searching for what’s really good, we can reasonably say that, to a significant degree,
we “know God.” This is why Hegel can confidently assert, contrary to notions of sheer “faith,”
that we know God. While at the same time acknowledging that obviously we don’t know God in
the same way that we know physical objects. In fact we know God more intimately than we
know physical objects, since we know God through our own inner mental acts that are directed
at self-determination. Probably we aren’t often aware of the fullest reality, the sum total of what’s
truly itself, as such; but we’re often aware of one aspect of the fullest reality, which is the
process of seeking greater self-determination and freedom for ourselves.[5]

I know that this Hegelian conception of God sounds pretty “squishy,” at first hearing. What is this
thing that’s neither identical with us and the world, nor a separate being from us and the world?
How can we even talk about such a thing?

The first answer, of course, is that what we’re talking about isn’t a “thing” at all, because if he (or
she or it) were a “thing,” he (she, it) would be limited, as we are, and wouldn’t be God. So we
need to stretch the limits of our ordinary language, which is pretty much designed for talking
about limited “things” like ourselves. Above all, we need to get used to the idea that a word like
“real” doesn’t necessarily refer simply to material objects that we can measure, weigh, and kick.
Nor need it refer to an additional category of objects, such as “minds” or “souls,” that aren’t
material objects but somehow get connected with material objects. Instead, “reality” can be a
matter of degree, proportional to the object’s degree of success in being self-governing, self-
determining, and “itself.” This is the significance of Hegel’s famous transition from “Substance”
to “Subject,” in the course of his Logic. “Subject” is what is self-determining and thereby real as
itself. Without an understanding of this dimension of increasing reality through “Subject”-hood,
the notion of “God” seems to be doomed to the sort of self-stultifying anthropomorphism that
Hegel criticized, in which God is pictured as “a being,” a finite quasi-object, like us.

I suspect that it would be very difficult to understand what Hegel is doing without having some
acquaintance with the traditions of mystical literature, such as St Augustine, Meister Eckhart,
Jelaluddin Rumi, St Teresa of Avila, and modern poets such as Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson,
Whitman, and Rilke. They all show that Hegel isn’t alone in stretching ordinary language to
evoke a reality that, to some degree, is bound to elude it.  And they show that the intimate
connection between God and ourselves that Hegel proposes—we’re not identical, but we’re not
separate beings, either—has plenty of precedents in the history of religious thought. Consider
St. Augustine’s famous description of God as “more inward [to me] than my most inward part”;
Meister Eckhart’s dictum that “we must act from our own inner self, which is him [God] in us”;
Rumi’s “There’s no need to go outside” (to find God); and Whitman’s “There is that in me […]/It
is not chaos or death…. It is form and union and plan… it is eternal life…. it is happiness.”[6]

The distinctive thing about Hegel’s contribution to this mystical literature is, of course, that he
aspires to a more systematic and logically sound statement than poets are obliged to produce.
His key contribution for this purpose is his explanation of just how it is that God is “within us,”
while still being in important ways beyond us. God is “within us” because God is our freedom,
our ability to be ourselves rather than merely being the product of our surroundings. At the same
time God is always beyond us, because we’re never fully free, never fully self-determining and
ourselves. As the mystics constantly tell us, if we achieved full freedom, the finite “we” would no
longer be there; only the infinite “we” or “I,” which is God, would be there.

In drawing this connection between divinity and the human capacity for self-determination,
Hegel follows the prior examples of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. All four of these thinkers focus
in various ways on the notion of a higher, self-determining reality with which we can be involved
through our capacity for seeking to be self-determining, to be ourselves. The exit from the Cave,
in book vii of Plato’s Republic, is an image of pursuing the Good, which (as Plato explained
earlier, in books iv and v) is the way in which the tripartite “soul” is able to act as one, and thus
(we could add) to be one, be fully itself and be self-determining. This is the basis of Plato’s
announcements in the Theaetetus and the Timaeus that the philosopher can be “like
God.”[7] When we understand Plato’s writings in this way, what is absolutely central for him is
not the Forms, as such, but rather the process of transcendence whereby the soul becomes
one, fully itself and self-determining. Plato believes that this process presupposes something
like the Forms, but later thinkers who follow him in other respects are often revisionary about the
Forms. Aristotle’s account of human functioning in the Nicomachean Ethics and De anima is
very similar to Plato’s in focusing on a vertical dimension by which humans can transcend their
animal roots and develop what is “divine” in them.[8]  This dimension, and not the Forms as
such, is likewise the central concern of Plotinus, who describes the soul as seeking to find itself
and thus truly be itself through the fuller reality of the One.

By taking Kant as his primary point of departure, Hegel was in effect taking an important modern
version of this broadly understood “Platonism” as his point of departure. In contrast to
materialists and empiricists, Kant and Plato agree that the crucial feature of human functioning
is the human being’s ability to achieve a kind of inner unity and self-government that non-
rational beings can’t achieve (or can achieve only to a lesser degree). Kant and
Plato disagree in that Plato thinks that our knowledge of this difference in functioning justifies us
in believing that the result—namely, what he calls the “soul” or the “divine”—is more fully real;
whereas Kant assigns the soul and the divine merely “regulative” functions in practical
reasoning, and no status as known realities.
There is no reason to assume that thinkers like Hegel who agree with Plato rather than with
Kant on this issue, are thereby engaging in a distinctively “religious” rather than “secular” type of
thinking. Rather, it seems that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel have simply come to different
conclusions than Kant came to about what deserves to be called “real,” and in what sense.
Since Kant (unlike Hegel, in particular) seems not to have given focused attention to the
different possible meanings of the word “real,” it may well be that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and
especially Hegel give a clearer and more persuasive account of “reality,” as such, than Kant
does. In any case, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel all claim to be engaging in pure
philosophy (as opposed to un-philosophical “religious” thinking), and it seems to me that it’s
appropriate for us to take them at their word on this, unless and until someone shows from the
detail of their arguments how what they were doing is not pure philosophy.

Writers who interpret modern philosophy as seeking to replace more or less theistic
metaphysics with a kind of thinking that’s “secular” (i.e., non-“religious”) need to confront the fact
that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel all seem to base their talk about “god” on the same
process of seeking self-government and self-determination on which Kant focuses in his
Critiques.[9] Why should modern philosophy exclude a certain kind of thinking as non-“secular,”
if the foundation of that thinking isn’t different in principle from its own? A proper appreciation of
the Platonic tradition will make it clear that transcendence and divinity are perfectly legitimate
concepts for philosophy as such, because their relevance doesn’t depend on our accepting any
sort of non-rational revelation or dogma. The modern preoccupation with the confrontation
between dogmatic religion and skeptical “secularism,” which continues in (for example) the
debates recently set off by the “new atheists,” makes it difficult for people to get into focus this
third, non-dogmatic but “spiritual” option. But one has to ask, why should we assume that when
metaphysicians speak of “God,” their agenda has been set for them by dogma, rather than by
autonomous reason? Why shouldn’t God himself (herself, itself) be an extrapolation of
autonomous reason, as I’m suggesting he (she, it) is for the entire Platonic tradition, including
Hegel?[10]

The prospectus for this conference asked us whether Hegel continued “the world-view that
inextricably linked orthodox theological and metaphysical notions,” or should be thought of
instead as “advancing the spirit of Kant’s critical project.” It’s hard to know where exactly—in
how much of our history—this “linkage” of metaphysics with orthodox theology is supposed to
be “inextricable.” It is, at any rate, clear that Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, being pagans, had no
interest in church dogma. I believe, in fact, that these three thinkers anticipated everything that’s
valid in Kant’s critical project, so that their (chronologically pre-Kantian) “metaphysical notions”
are not, in general, vulnerable to justifiable Kantian skepticism. The same, of course, need not
be true of orthodox Christian or other theologies, or of particular arguments constructed by
various theologians with the aid of concepts borrowed from Plato or Aristotle. Many of these
arguments are quite vulnerable to the kinds of critiques to which Kant, and Hegel as well,
subjected them. In particular, the common notion of an omnipotent, omniscient being is
vulnerable precisely to Hegel’s critique of spurious infinity. But neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor
Plotinus, nor Hegel himself advances such a notion. They suggest instead something like the
more subtle, “true-infinity” conception of God that I’ve been outlining, which does not appear to
be vulnerable to Kant’s justifiable criticisms.

So my answer to the prospectus’s question is that Hegel certainly advanced the spirit of Kant’s
critical project, just as Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, “Kantians” avant la lettre, had done before.
It’s only the limited perspective of the modern struggle against church dogma that gives Hume
and Kant the mantle of advocates of free thought, and denies that mantle to Plato and his
successors in philosophical theology, including Hegel.

You may be wondering how Hegel, who (unlike Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) presents himself
as a more or less orthodox Christian, can be an advocate of free thought. Not having space to
go into the relevant texts in detail here, I can only offer the (I think) uncontroversial observation
that in unfolding his Logic and his system, Hegel has no intention of appealing to Christian or
any other dogma. Specifically Christian notions enter the system only in the Religion section of
Absolute Spirit, and there (as always) Hegel claims to arrive at these notions by strict logical
development out of the concept of freedom, which underlies Spirit as a whole. So once again,
interpretive charity requires that we take him at his word, unless and until it has been shown that
some portion of this development in fact conflicts with his claims about it.

It’s time, now, to turn to objections from, as it were, the other side. You may be wondering, what
does the Plato/Hegel “God” have to do with the God that we learned about in Sunday school,
who created the world in seven days, sent his Son to save us from our sins, and will judge us at
the end of time? Rather than using the name, “God,” for Plato’s or Hegel’s emerging fullest
reality, wouldn’t it be more honest to use some technical term like (say) “the Absolute” or “the
Ground of Being,” which wouldn’t imply any particular connection with traditional religion? Blaise
Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger rejected what Pascal called the “God of the
philosophers” as having little or nothing to do with the God who’s worshipped by ordinary
believers.

I want to underline several ways in which even without the biblical mythology, and without the
anthropomorphic conception of God as “a being,” Hegel’s conception of God nevertheless
seems to capture what ordinary believers care about the most. So that it makes good sense to
say that he’s still describing what they call “God.”

The first point is that when Hegel and his predecessors in the tradition of mystical philosophy
talk about human beings becoming more “themselves” by stepping back from their current
desires and projects, this stepping back has consequences that go well beyond the “intellect,”
as we usually think of it. Plato wrote extensively about love (eros). His central concern in this
writing was to show that inner freedom and love, head and heart, are not ultimately separable
from one another.[11] First, Plato showed that love necessarily has an intellectual dimension, a
dimension of inner freedom or questioning. This is because love seeks what’s truly Good for
those it loves, and therefore it has to ask the question, what is truly Good?[12] This requires
thought, which is the function of intellect. And second, Plato aimed to show that inner freedom
ultimately has to lead to love of others, for their capacity for freedom. Plato says in
the Symposium that we can “possess the Good forever” only by “giving birth” to an orientation to
the Good (and thus, we might add, to an actualization of freedom) in others. But it seems that if
we were to limit the number of others whom we care about in this way, we would replace the
“forever” by a limited portion of space and time.[13]

Hegel spells out what’s probably essentially the same thought in the following way. If I exclude
anyone from what I’m concerned about, I define myself by my relationship to them (namely, the
relationship of excluding them), and thus I prevent myself from being fully self-determining: that
is, from having inner freedom. It’s easy enough to see in everyday life that people who think of
themselves as having “enemies” seldom manage to be very free, internally. It’s not that we must
agree with others about everything, or endorse everything that they do. Rather, it’s that we need
to be able to see something in others that we can identify with, so as not to be confronted by
something completely alien, which will define us (always) by this relationship rather than by
ourselves. But to identify with something in others is at least a key aspect of what we call loving
them. So Plato and Hegel have shown that there is an intimate connection between inner
freedom and love.

Now, this intimate connection must operate most of all, obviously, on the level of God. The God
who is fully self-determining because he (she, it) isn’t defined by “not being” anything else, is
intimately involved in every living thing, as its capacity for self-determination. Hegel describes
this involvement as “free love and boundless blessedness,” just because of its universal
inclusiveness.[14] Since, as we just said, full self-determination must be loving, to be involved
in the self-determination of one is to be involved in the self-determination of all.

As for justice, the “last judgment,” and so forth, Hegel’s God administers this in the most direct
possible way. Beings who achieve freedom and love, achieve the greatest reality that any being
can achieve. They achieve a reality that’s effectively timeless. So their very actions reward
them. Those who exhibit less freedom and love, “enjoy” less reward. They aren’t equipped to
enjoy it. But Hegel’s God is likewise forgiving, as we read in the famous passage at the end of
Morality in the Phenomenology of Spirit  about the “reconciling Yea in which the two ‘I’s let go
their antithetical Dasein,” and they are “God manifested ….”[15] Everyone is God manifested,
in whatever part of themselves isn’t or wasn’t “antithetical.”

Thus Hegel’s God exhibits the combination of justice and nurturing love that we see in the more
inspiring documents of the Abrahamic religions. Justice, because all are included and are
treated appropriately, and love for the same reason.

Hegel’s conception explains and preserves another famous feature of Abrahamic religion as
well. The God that Hegel describes as emerging from the world of finite things, gives to them
the greatest reality of which they’re capable. In this way, Hegel’s God performs something very
similar to what’s traditionally called “creating.”

However, this Hegelian “creating” takes place throughout time, rather than only “in the
beginning.” And it deals with a kind of “reality” that, though we’re intimately familiar with it, can’t
be the subject matter of natural science, which is all about how things depend on other things to
make them what they are. For both of these reasons, Hegel’s God doesn’t conflict with what
astrophysics and biology tell us about the history of the universe.

The final question that people ask is, is Hegel’s God a “personal God”? If a “person” resembles
you and me by being a finite thing that you or I could confront face to face, then obviously
Hegel’s God is not a “person.” If, on the other hand, a “person” is a reality characterized by inner
freedom, then Hegel’s God clearly is “personal” to the maximum possible degree. Religion
seems to be about learning to recognize and to love this kind of “person,” in all of his (her, its)
manifestations.

Thus, Hegel’s “philosopher’s God” is not only less open to doubt than the Abrahamic God, as
conventionally understood, is. (Less open to doubt because of the way Hegel’s God is “in us,”
and thus knowable by us.) Hegel’s God also seems to preserve all of the Abrahamic God’s
worship-inspiring features, but without conflicting with the empirical sciences as the Abrahamic
God, as conventionally understood, does.

In dealing with the literal statements of Abrahamic religion, whether in the scriptures or
elsewhere, the charitable thing is to assume that these statements are trying to refer to the
reality that Plato and Hegel describe. People who insist on literal interpretations generally do so
either from fear or from anger: from fear that without the letter, everything will be lost, or from
anger at the hypocrisy of self-appointed spokespersons. Greater understanding can dispel this
fear and moderate this anger. What is essential will not be lost, and the self-appointed
spokespersons are, after all, only self-appointed.

[1] As one instance of this common conception let me quote Timothy A. Robinson’s introduction
to his anthology, God (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), p. xv: “This God has traditionally been
identified as a being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good….” I’m not sure that this
conception (“a being”) is in fact endorsed by the great classic theologians, such as St Augustine
and St Thomas Aquinas. But few popular writers about God seem to have gotten the message
that God cannot be “a being.” I hope that spelling out Hegel’s critique of this common
conception can help people to understand both what’s wrong with it and how to avoid it.
[2] William Desmond has provided one of the most extensive and thoughtful recent discussions
of Hegel’s philosophical theology, in his Hegel and God: The Question of the Counterfeit
Double (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). But Desmond neither states nor responds to Hegel’s
critique, which I just outlined, of conventional conceptions of God. Desmond wants to distinguish
(see pp. 2-6) between a kind of “transcendence” of which humans are capable, and another
kind of “transcendence” of which only God is capable; and he thinks that Hegel fails to maintain
both of these in their separate significance. But such a duality of kinds of transcendence is
made questionable precisely by Hegel’s argument. Hegel’s argument points out that a duality in
which “God” is on one side and something else, such as humans, is on the other, threatens to
prevent this “God” from being truly transcendent, because something that “is not” the other, is
limited by its relationship to the other, and thus doesn’t really transcend the other. Desmond’s
appeal to an unexamined dichotomy between humans and God, to ground his critique of
Hegel’s conception of transcendence, appears to assume in advance precisely the sort of
contrast that Hegel’s argument challenges (challenges by pointing out that the contrast makes
“God” finite and non-transcendent). I’ll explain below how Hegel’s alternative to this
conventional contrast does not involve making God identical with humans.
[3] Robert M. Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[4] Please also note that I haven’t said that God as such emerges from finite objects like us in
the course of time. For time, like us, is finite. It’s limited by not being space, not being matter,
etc. So whatever full reality time has, doesn’t belong to time itself but derives from God (that is,
from self-determination). The achievement of self-determination can’t lie within time, since if it
did the achievement would be (to that extent) finite and wouldn’t be full self-determination. The
whole relation between God and what’s finite, including time, must be located, in an important
way, outside time, although we experience it (ordinarily) within time.
[5] The “proof of God’s existence” that I’ve just given—for if we know God, this God must exist
—is Hegel’s distinctive contribution to the genre. It coincides with none of the traditional
“proofs,” differing from them especially in the way it relies on a special kind of human
experience. But one can see why Hegel was most sympathetic, among the traditional proofs, to
the “ontological argument.” For that argument, like Hegel’s own argument, takes as its point of
departure something like a certain kind of human experience, namely, our having a certain
conception of God.
[6] St. Augustine, Confessions, book iii, ch. vi, p. 43 in Henry Chadwick’s translation (New York:
Oxford U. Press, 1991); Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (London:
Penguin, 1994), p. 190 (German Sermon 19); Rumi, The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
(New York: Harper, 2004), p. 13; Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Chant 50.
[7] Plato, Republic  444e  (acting as “one”), Theaetetus 176b and Timaeus 90c (becoming “like
God”).
[8] On the important respects in which Aristotle agrees with Plato, see Lloyd P.
Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
[9] Paul Redding interprets modern philosophy as “secular” in his very interesting paper,
“Hegel, Idealism, and God: Philosophy as the Self-Correcting Appropriation of the Norms of Life
and Thought,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy,  vol. 3, nos.
2-3, 2007.
[10] Just as common interpretations of modern metaphysical philosophy (as in Hegel) are
skewed by the assumption that “God” characteristically has something to do with dogma, so
also are leading interpretations of modern Romantic poetry. In his classic Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973),
M.H. Abrams interpreted the Romantic poets as seeking to fill the gap left by the demise of
orthodox religion. He thus assumed that the original and characteristic way of relating to a
transcendent reality is the “religious” one. One can hardly deny that Abrams’s thesis about
Romanticism contains a large grain of truth. The decline of orthodox piety among intellectuals
did indeed create space for the Romantics’ “natural supernaturalism.” But if Abrams had
appreciated the way the Romantics revive the Platonic approach to transcendent reality, an
approach that isn’t “religious” in the sense of being linked to church dogma, he might not have
been so quick to use the demise of orthodox religion as the sole or primary datum in relation to
which to interpret this literature. At least from an intellectual point of view, an equally plausible
approach would be to interpret orthodox religion as a temporary interruption in the ongoing
tradition of un-dogmatic Platonic spirituality, to which the English Romantic poets (and their
successors such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Rilke) then return. But our historical experience
has been so deeply imprinted by dogmatic religion that many of us find it very difficult to set that
experience on one side and appreciate the variety of other approaches to transcendence that
the world has known.
[11] I don’t mean (of course) that Plato speaks of “inner freedom” as such. But his account of
the soul’s functioning “as one” (in Republic v) can be understood as an account of what we
might call inner freedom, insofar as both functioning as one and what we call inner freedom are
ways of being fully oneself.
[12] See Symposium 205e and 210a-212b.
[13] Symposium 206a-b. Plato discusses a process of “giving birth” that goes on within each
human life (207d-208b) as well as between one person and others, implying that when one is
committed to the process, conventional boundaries lose their relevance. 
[14] Science of Logic, trans. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), p. 603
(=Wissenschaft der Logik, suhrkamp edition, vol. 6, p. 277; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, p. 35).
[15] Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §671.

Marx & Philosophy Review of BooksReviews‘Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and

the Future of Capitalism’ by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James
Steinhoff reviewed by Bruce Robinson

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James

Steinhoff
Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of
Capitalism
Pluto Press, London, 2019. 224 pp. £ 16.99 pb
ISBN 9780745338606

Reviewed by Bruce Robinson

1125View comments

About the reviewer

Bruce Robinson is a retired lecturer in Information Technology who has worked in AI

and has had a …
 More
Driven by a massive growth in computing power and in data on which to work,
artificial intelligence (AI) applications are becoming pervasive in the economy
and in everyday life. What is the likely outcome of the current AI boom? Will AI
have deep effects on capitalism and the prospects for replacing it? Inhuman
Power examines these questions and seeks to understand AI more widely. Its
coverage is wide with a bibliography of over thirty pages and it fuses Marxist
analysis of machines and labour with a detailed examination of current AI
technology. (The introduction contains crisp accounts of both.) As such, it is
essential reading for anyone interested in a critical analysis of current
technological developments.

Inhuman Power is not just critical of what Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff
call ‘AI-capital’. They also believe that AI poses a challenge to Marxism in that,
if artificially intelligent machines do present a real threat to the uniqueness of
human powers, we must question ‘assumptions about the labour theory of value,
the continued centrality of struggles at the point of production or even the
confidence that capitalism cannot survive the abolition of its human waged
workforce’ (8).

The book begins by announcing a polemical intent: against those who think that
AI’s development can be separated from the drives and limits of capital; against
those on the left who believe that nothing radically different is going on from the
previous boom and bust AI cycles; and against the left accelerationists who argue
that AI should be embraced even in its current form as it will enable an eventual
utopia. Instead, despite emphasising that there is no certainty about the path the
development of ‘AI-capital’, the authors see it taking us to the edge of an abyss
threatening, not the end of capitalism as the accelerationists imply, but a negative
end to human waged labour driven by what Dyer-Witheford (2015) calls the
‘cybernetic drive’ of capital to automate. Capital is pursuing its aims more and
more impersonally and relentlessly through machines. Yet the adoption of AI
will be uneven and subject to the vagaries of capital investment, creating a ‘slow
tsunami’ of ‘market-driven technological change gradually flooding out the
labour market, driving remunerated work to diminishing […] islands of human-
centric production’ (143).

This perspective becomes the central theme of the book and the many doubts and
qualifications that are mentioned are set aside however to provide a more black
and white analysis. Alternatives are too narrowly presented as between their
framework of a gradual move to the abyss and those characterised as
‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘Business-as-usual’ (87-91). More likely is that AI, while
having an important impact on labour processes and employment (though not as
radical as often assumed), will eventually bump up against distinct limits rooted
in the technology itself and the nature of computation, in the nature of human
labour, and also in the political economy of capitalism – automation beyond a
certain point poses problems both of finding markets and assuring smooth,
responsive labour processes.

The first of the three central chapters of the book deals with the history and
current state of AI- capital. AI is becoming one of what Marx called the general
conditions of production, a foundational element of the infrastructure, such as
electricity, transport and communications, taken for granted as providing a basis
for production – the ‘means of cognition’ (31) . The further development and
control of the technology will be in the hands of the existing tech oligoplies. This
rests on the assumption that ‘capital’s current love affair with AI is not broken up
by performance failures and commitment nerves’ (46) – an open question. The
authors acknowledge that ‘many [AI technologies] will fail […] an AI bubble
will probably burst’ (146; see also 44-6), though this seems of little consequence
for their overall assessment beyond a passing remark that ‘the AI revolution
might subside with a digitally voiced whimper’ (46).

The term AI-capitalism is also used to describe ‘actually existing AI’ as a new
stage of capitalist development succeeding post-Fordism and characterised by
‘narrow AI’ restricted to specific domains, most commonly in the form of
machine learning (ML) systems using platforms and the Cloud as delivery
mechanisms. A future stage of ‘fully developed AI capitalism’ is also proposed
based on developments of AI already under development but yet to be delivered
(50-51), involving ‘hyper-subsumption in which capital’s autonomizing force
manifests as AI’ (21).

The second chapter uses the autonomist conception of class composition to look
at changes in work and labour markets. The theory’s assumption that, as a result
of labour’s irreplaceable role in production, class ‘recomposition’ takes place as
workers ‘perceive the cracks and weaknesses in capital’s latest methods of
control’ (70), has ceased to be valid  as the drive of capital to replace living
labour enters a new stage powered by AI. The alternative to machines of
employing cheap global labour is fading (74). The result is ‘surplus populations’
which now – with AI and automation – face the prospect of being permanently
superfluous to the needs of capital.

It is not that there is no resistance – there are seven areas of struggles ‘which
challenge the current trajectory of AI-capital’ (102-7). These struggles, though all
related to aspects of AI, lack a unifying perspective and point of attack,
something due not merely to organisational weakness or differing emphases. The
organised left and unions have failed to develop strategies for dealing with AI.

The authors rightly reject getting too involved in the game of predicting job loss
numbers and note that AI creates certain jobs – precarious, on-call, global – in
the processes of its own implementation, taking on tasks which AI cannot
perform by itself, such as the labelling of images for ML systems and the
recognition of undesirable content. Such work takes place behind the scenes to
make AI work smoothly and in the manner intended.

This raises two questions. Firstly, is it always in the interests of capital to replace
labour with machines based simply on their relative costs? Even AI-capital has to
worry about having a labour process that ensures reliable, seamless production
and can adapt flexibly to the market. Given the limitations of AI, this requires
human labour. Is such ‘ghost work […] in automation’s last mile’ (Gray and Suri
2019,  ix) transitional in a period where AI is still developing: ‘Infrastructural AI
[saves] the human cognitive apparatus for whatever machines cannot yet handle’
(61; emphasis added)? Or does it reflect human capacities that machines cannot
replace?

The third chapter addresses this question with an examination of the implications
of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the goal of AI ‘with capacities for
reasoning with general knowledge and doing a variety of tasks in diverse and
unfamiliar domains’ (110). As AGI is ‘a technology that has yet to, and might
never, see the light of day’, the chapter is best thought of as ‘more science fiction
than science fact’ (111), intended to question Marxist assumptions about labour
and the uniqueness of humans, asserting that there is ‘an isomorphism between
the theoretical notion of AGI and Marx’s concept of labour and labour power’
(110), thus raising the ‘possibility of a capitalism without human beings’ (111).

This argument takes two paths: the first, a transhistorical comparison of the
capacities of AGIs and humans; the second, an argument that AGIs’ role in
capitalist production can be equated to variable rather than fixed capital, thereby
constituting labour-power and producing value, becoming ‘doubly free’
proletarians.

The book argues that Marx underestimated the ability of animals to undertake
‘things previously held to be uniquely human [and] the same holds for machines’
(120). The distinct nature of human activity is then reduced to adaptability or a
capacity to generalise based on limited data. This is taken to be Marx’s position
and used to ‘posit an isomorphism between general intelligence [as in AGI] and
Marx’s concept of labour power and labour’. If this is true, it follows ‘that AGI,
almost per definition, is capable of performing labour’ (126).

However Marx’s concept of labouring capacity points to the subjective elements

of labour which form its use-value, and require human embodiment . They are
counterposed to formal, logical, objective knowledge and action and include
experiential skills, individual modes of action and non-objectifiable genuine
living knowledge, often highly contextualised to the environment in which the
worker acts and which are crucial to the viability of labour processes (Pfeiffer,
2014).

Further, human general intelligence differs from domain specific skill in more
ways than adaptability or an ability to generalise. Braga and Logan (2017) list
‘curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics,
joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom,
judgment, and even humor’ as human qualities AI systems do not possess. While
some of these may not be necessary for them to function in capitalist labour
processes, human powers of conceptualisation, will and conscious goal-directed
activity, emphasised by Marx, are and remain outside the scope of machines for
reasons rooted in both the nature of computation and in the capacities of human
beings.
Despite s qualifications, Inhuman Power too often takes AI as its proponents
present it. For example, cognition and perception are ascribed to actually existing
AI (60-62), whereas domain-specific machine learning systems, the currently
dominant form, are instead best just seen as machines for pattern recognition
based on inductive reasoning (which has well known fallacies and biases) and
lacking semantics (Pasquinelli, 2017). Stating that AI simply accomplishes what
humans do albeit in different ways (62) neglects an important distinction between
performance and underlying understanding which seriously affects human-AI
interaction. Better algorithms or more computing power do not overcome these
limits to AI.

The conclusion to Inhuman Power raises the question of whether there can be a

‘communist AI’. Starting from the position of ‘neither halting AI (Luddism) nor
intensifying it’ but instead removing the drive to replace human labour and
expropriating AI-capital (153-4), the authors promisingly talk of ‘working class
steering of AI development.’ (154)This points to the centrality of a politics that
remains rooted in production and of alternative forms and paths of technological
development. AI would necessarily have to change from being centred on
producing machines outstripping human beings to becoming focused on the
creation of artefacts and techniques that complement, enable or, when rationally
justified and democratically decided, reduce human labour in areas that require
intelligence.

Such a human-centred focus to technology sits uneasily with the book’s

ecological post-humanism in which humans form an equal part of an
undifferentiated ontology alongside nature and machines (160). In the context of
AI, this conception concedes too much to the capabilities and ontological status
of machines when a refocus on humans as central to labour processes is a crucial
part of a critique of AI-capital.

While this review raises disagreements with the book’s central perspective, it is
valuable and marks a step forward in Marxist accounts of AI. The range and
depth of material used makes it a good reference point for anyone seeking an up-
to-date account linking AI and Marxism. It also raises a number of important
issues for debate, particularly in its challenges to both Marxism and to the
dominant assumptions on the left about AI. It is to be hoped that they will be
taken up and that Inhuman Power will spark more informed discussions about AI
that will benefit Marxists, radical technologists and those directly facing AI-
capital.

6 October 2019

References
 Braga, Adriana, and Robert Logan 2017 The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes:
Limits to Artificial Intelligence Information 8 (4):
156 https://doi.org/10.3390/info8040156
  Dyer-Witheford, Nick 2015 Cyber-Proletariat London: Pluto Press
 Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri 2019 Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from
Building a New Global Underclass Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
 Pasquinelli, Matteo 2017 Machines That Morph Logic: Neural Networks and the
Distorted Automation of Intelligence as Statistical Inference Glass Bead 1
(1) https://www.glass-bead.org/article/machines-that-morph-logic/?lang=enview
 Pfeiffer, Sabine 2014 Digital Labour and the Use-Value of Human Work. On the
Importance of Labouring Capacity for Understanding Digital Capitalism Triple-
C 12(2): 599–619

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