Assimilation, even ingestion and digestion, governs God’s self-revelation for Hegel
Evidence
A God conceived as something to be consumed is in Balthasar’s view an unacceptable concept of God. These ‘mysteries of the act of eating’ extend their darkness in every direction, embracing not only the Entäußerung, the divine self-abasement, but also the Erhebung, the elevation of man to God. Could it not be claimed that Hegel’s way of conceptualizing self-revelation must make religion the site of the mutual devouring of God and man, each attracted to the other by their respective hunger for being? It is worth remembering the arguments of the Philosophy of Nature, which maintained that ‘in every process, organic and spiritual, assimilation (Assimilation) is the most essential factor’. Not even God will escape from the rule prescribing ingestion and digestion; even He finds himself submitted to the ‘substantial change, i.e. the general immediate transformation of one external or particular material into another’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 722
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
Related
- Hegel applies the metabolic rule of assimilation even to God’s self-revelation (similarity 0.95)
- Hegel read the animal organism as a syllogism of self-relation, assimilation, and generic process (similarity 0.88)
- For Hegel spirit is not merely self-contained thought but essentially self-revelation and objectivity (similarity 0.81)
- Hegel’s critique of reified divine presence paradoxically enables a more intimate possession of God (similarity 0.80)
- Hegel uniquely read the Death of God as divine self-negation (similarity 0.80)
- For Hegel God’s essence includes self-representation and being-for-itself (similarity 0.80)
- Hegel’s God is necessarily self-revealing and incapable of envy (similarity 0.80)
- Hegel frames self-transformation into second nature as man’s defining attribute (similarity 0.79)
- Hegel’s ontology of consciousness remains framed entirely in terms of knowledge. (similarity 0.78)
- For Hegel, God’s death is an internal moment of God’s own development. (similarity 0.78)