Hegel refigures divine decline as an eruption of futurity, not degeneration

Evidence

Philosophers who see a diminishment of God (yet God, without his incline, would be no more than an abstract and impoverished concept) in the necessity of this decline (involved as much in the essence of the Aristotelian θες as that of the God of Revelation) are missing the profound originality of Hegel’s thought. To introduce a negativity in God which puts him into motion and makes possible his flexing, is undoubtedly the highest possible way of imagining his eminence, the condition and dimension of his fall. Hegel is a thinker for whom the movement of falling is not a degeneration in the ordinary sense of the word, but a term of expiration – something which falls due. It is a matter of taking the future into account, a future which erupts when it ‘comes from’ and explodes while falling. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1259

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s brain-plasticity work: negativity within a structure as enabling rather than weakening motion is the same logic as neural plasticity within fixed architecture. — connects to: For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 154; Hegel positioned modern God’s-death feeling as a moment of the Idea — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 766
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that falling-as-expiration makes the future explode is dense and provocative; the parenthetical redefinition of God’s essence before his incline is a genuine paradigm-shifter for reading Hegel.

Broader Connections

• For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being #expands (0.90) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 154
• Hegel positioned modern God’s-death feeling as a moment of the Idea #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 766