Why Truth is a Person

Truth is not a minted coin

As I recently re-read the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I was struck by his phrase that "truth is not a minted coin." By this I think he means that truth is not an object which can be handled, kept in our pocket, or trafficked in freely.

Whatever the truth might be, Hegel contends, it cannot be something like an artifact which can be taken up at will or a formula which may be rehearsed.

In fact, the True is not an object at all. Hegel's whole philosophical project is devoted to his notion that "substance is subject." This simple but cryptic phrase indicates that matter is not an inert substance, but rather is dynamic and internally divided just like the human person themselves.

Hegel wants us to see that truth is an event, a moment in the becoming of an agent which he calls Spirit. Hegel envisions reality, and the involvement of consciousness in it, as based on the free movement of Spirit in which Being alienates itself from itself in an initial act of analysis, and then returns to itself through a moment of cognition in which this negation leads to the creation of a new Concept.

You see, nothing is more false for Hegel than that which is familiar or immediate. We are liable to be lead astray by what we immediately intuit or what we take for granted. Familiar ideas must be raised to the level of concepts by passing through the fire of analysis in which they become unfamiliar. Only once things appear to us as strange can we begin to see their essence, and consequently be able to discover how that essence is expressed in each moment which makes up their concept.

As I've mentioned, Hegel attributes this continual process of self-othering (alienation) and self-integration (sublation) to an agent or subject he refers to as Spirit (Geist). In this way, he seeks to disabuse us of the idea that truth is an object we can acquire (a minted coin), and instead tries to outline for us how we can get involved in truth's own ongoing self-process. We are invited to participate as co-creators, and thereby to become an essential part of Spirit's own process of knowing.

Many people have trouble making this leap from an idea of truth as a substance to truth as a subject. In particular, how does a thinker shift their contemplation from an ineffable One of the God of the philosophers to the person of Jesus Christ? Christianity insists on the vital importance of this additional step – that it's insufficient to simply acknowledge one infinite and eternal divine being, and that one must push further beyond an abstract notion of Being in order to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

This confession has a radical implication – Truth is a person.

A Personal Spirit

This idea that "truth is a person" can be a bridge too far for some. In the midst of the discourse about society's "meaning crisis," we find thinkers like Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke who seem to be arriving at the conclusion that we need to recover a notion of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. However, they cannot bring themselves to take the additional step of saying that the True is a person, a particular person.

I propose that we read Hegel within his Christian context (he was a devout Lutheran), and thus seek to use his thought in a Christological and Trinitarian experiment. For instance, what happens when we conceive of the Biblical history of salvation through this Hegelian framework? What does God's self-revelation in history show us about who He is?

Let us take Yahweh as the immediate and familiar God – all-mighty, wrathful, variable, corrigible, and in need of appeasement. While Yahweh does begin the work of clearly differentiating Himself from the surrounding nations' deities by demanding a higher ethical standard from His people, the image of God we find in the Biblical literature of this time still too much resembles the idea of God which humans would have dreamed up from their most primitive and base instincts.

However, in Christ, the people of Israel encounter God's act of absolute self-othering in His becoming-human, culminating even in the ultimate scandal of death on a cross. This surprising union of God and humanity in the person Jesus of Nazareth serves to present a moment of alienation in which the eternal breaks out within the finite, life appears from within death, and the Creator takes upon Himself the pain and contradictions of creation.

Only in this absolute alienation does God's true essence appear. As Paul says, the mystery which was hidden for ages has now appeared to us, that is "Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Col. 1:26) Through fully experiencing finitude, the seemingly ultimate contradiction of an eternal and unlimited God dying and coming back to life, we learn that God's fundamental orientation is one of communion (the Trinity) and of love (His saving work).

But then this is where Hegel's choice of Spirit in his philosophical vocabulary is so pregnant with possibility. Jesus tells his disciples that he must leave in order for the Spirit to come, and in fact that this state of affairs is better for them! (John 16:7) The Holy Spirit whom Jesus will send is the Spirit he shares with the Father, which makes this Spirit a personal Spirit – the spirit of such a potent Love that Love itself has become a person in the Holy Spirit.

We don't have to stop here though, for Christ's ascension and sending of the Spirit also gives birth to the Spirit community here on earth – through the Spirit, we become God's hands and feet within His creation. Just as we have become the body of Christ, so too we incarnate God's life and His work amongst the people and nations of this world. The personal Spirit animates and imparts the love which gives shape to the Spirit community's reconciling labor.

As the song intones –

Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes with which He sees
Yours are the feet with which He walks
Yours are the hands with which He blesses all the world
Yours are the hands

The Spirit community stands in the fire of the personal Spirit, the Spirit of the Son of God who is also the Son of Man, the divine man who has taken death into himself, thereby transforming it into an abundant life which allows the finite to taste the infinite in time and space. What might it be like to step into this experience? I believe that Hegel attempts to describe precisely this in his philosophy – it's like walking in discipleship with the Spirit.

These provisional thoughts about Hegel's system as the proclamation of Truth as a personal Spirit undertaking a historical project of Reconciliation forms the basis of my next long term writing project, a book which explores the nature and possibility of reconciliation. I'll be sure to update you all when I know more. Thanks for reading!