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ABSTRACT
This paper explores the structural similarities between Hegel’s conception of spirit and the Jewish medieval text, the Zohar’s, figuration of Shekhinah. The formal logic of spirit’s self-actualization is historically exemplified by Shekhinah in her existence as divinity’s indwelling presence in the world and her mythic embodiment of Jewish history. This study reads Shekhinah’s journey towards union with God as analogous to spirit’s passage towards absolute knowledge, a passage which concludes with what is often referred to as spirit’s ‘return to its elf.’ Contrary to some popular interpretations of Hegel, spirit’s return is an iterative, tautological return to itself as differentiated in itself. The discussion concludes with the claim that Shekhinah’s eschatological journey towards harmonious reunion with God occurs through a proleptic movement in which biblical past and prophesied future, or the Jews’s historically first and theoretically final redemption from exile, coalesce in a here and now in a similarly iterative manner which precludes it from a determinate, apocalyptic end.
Abbreviations
| ETW | = | Early Theological Writings |
| GBG | = | Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania |
| HS | = | Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology |
| ILA | = | Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics |
| LD | = | Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic Literature |
| LEB | = | Language, Eros Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination |
| LFA I | = | Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Vol. I |
| LY | = | Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 |
| PM | = | Philosophy of Mind |
| PS | = | Phenomenology of Spirit |
| RF | = | ‘Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory’ |
| SL | = | Science of Logic |
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 186.
2. Derrida, Clang, 54.
3. Alexander Magee, “The Kabbalistic Tree”, 150–186.
4. Olson, Hegel and the Spirit, 67.
5. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 125.
6. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 493, §808.
7. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 80.
8. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 84.
9. The Zohar, xxxi.
10. The imaginal body, according to Elliot R. Wolfson, is ‘a body whose corporality cannot be defined as either literal or metaphorical.’ Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift, 262, n. 10 262, n. 10. The ‘imaginal body,’ as we read it, is a ‘body’ whose ontological status inhabits an uncanny space between ontic materiality and figurative abstraction, unable to be determined by either term or by their disjunction.
11. Wolfson, Luminal Darkness, 35.
12. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia, 277–8, §214.
13. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 18, §384.
14. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 17, §248.
15. Hegel, The Science of Logic, 12; 21.11.
16. Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, 154.
17. The absolute, in theological terms, is the law which characterizes the process by which God empties and unfolds His infinite essence within the world across time. Towards this idea, Alexander Magee places the absolute within the following formulation: ‘The Eternal = Truth = Logos = Absolute Idea = God’. Op. cit. pp. 152.
18. ‘From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel’.
19. Kaplan, Inner Space, 37.
20. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, 25.
21. Scholem, Kabbalah, 172.
22. Jameson, The Hegel Variations, 43.
23. Shiviti derives from the first Hebrew word of Ps. 16:8: ‘I have set [shiviti] the Lord always before me’.
24. Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 135.
25. Hegel, Aesthetics, 802–3.
26. Hegel, Aesthetics, 175.
27. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 6.
28. Wolfson regards the Zohar’s narrative form as the convergence of anthropomorphism and theomorphism. This yields ‘a nonrepresentational language that points to the paradoxical imaging of God in human terms and the human in divine terms (op. cit., 39).
29. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 89.
30. Makkot 23b identifies two hundred and forty-eight organs and three hundred and sixty-five sinews in the human body, mirroring the quantity of positive and negative (prohibitive) mitzvot respectively.
31. Though there are approximately 304,800 Hebrew letters in a standard scroll, numerous methods of interpretation attempt to justify the figure of six hundred thousand. For instance, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s method of counting vowel marks along with the letters, or counting each letter according to their lexical elements (e.g. shin (ש), comprised of two vav’s (ו) and a zayin (ז), is counted as three letters). A more speculative method derives from an interpretation of Menachot 29a:17 by which the spaces between letters are identified as ‘hidden letters;’ an interpretation which makes reference to the mythical form of the Torah written with ‘black fire on white fire.’
32. Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 246.
33. Wolfson, “Melancholic Redemption and the Hopelessness of Hope,” 165.
34. Wolfson, “Recovering Futurity,” 302.
35. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 264.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Terrin Winkel
Terrin Winkel’s work focuses in particular on German Idealism, modern French theory and postmodern religious studies. He is a student at Roosevelt University. His current research interests include cultural practices of mourning and memorialization, the archiving of cultural memory, and theological conceptions of alterity.