The Ontological (Hegelian) Argument for The Existence of The Blessed Virgin Mary
For the celebration of the Queenship of Our Lady on May 31
This winter on the path to Rome I again returned to ruminating on the existence of Our Blessed Mother. This time considering a second theistic, yet Hegelian, ontological proof for the existence of the Our Lady. (1st proof is: here) On the vigil of the feast of the Purification I told Our Lady if I found a place to sleep indoors I would write it that evening. She kept her half of the bargain, and I failed to keep mine, though I did do a little work toward this end, I quickly grew tired and fell asleep. So now my word must be fulfilled. The argument, which like the previous one assumes theism, but in addition, assumes an Incarnation of the Deity, is as follows:
The Ontological Hegelian Argument for the Existence of Our Lady
What a human takes himself to be constitutes an essential part of who he is as a person. Basically, our self-conception is an integral part of who we are.
What a human takes himself to be can only be given by the recognition of others, or by recognizing others in their recognition of ourselves.
Efficacy in transmitting a self-conception through the recognition of others is proportionate to desire for the person recognized.
Desire is measured in terms of a willingness to risk and suffer for an Idea—i.e. for one´s own self-conception or for that of others.
If there is a defect in the self-conception, it constitutes a defect in the being of a person, and comes, in part, from being misrecognized by others.
God can only be perfect.
Should God become Incarnate, fully God and fully man, then God—assuming he works within and not overriding nature— would desire that someone exists to give Him a perfect self-conception, from someone who perfectly recognized Him, basically from infancy on for who He was, i.e. as being God Incarnate.
To give this perfect self-conception of the Incarnation, this recognizer must herself be the most perfect sort of non-divine human being that can be conceived.
The most perfect non-divine human being that can be conceived would be sinless, born without original sin, and virginal, as virginity is a perfection.
The most perfect sort of non-divine human recognition would be given with the greatest desire that can be conceived, manifesting itself in the greatest suffering that can be conceived, suffering in order to perfectly transmit the perfect self-conception to the Incarnation.
QED. If there is an Incarnation of the Deity, we must grant (1) a non-divine human being to which none greater can be conceived exists, she is (2) a sinless and virginal person who (3) recognizes the Incarnation for who He us and gives a perfect self-conception to him through (4) the greatest possible suffering on account of the Self-Conception given to the Incarnation.
Hegel on Self-Consciousness; the tri-partite structure of Recognition and Desire.
Let's turn to distill a few key points of Hegel's theory of distinctly human self-consciousness and the tripartite structure of recognition and desire to clarify the argument here (citations from Hegel are in footnotes).
The distinctive character of humanity is the potency for uniquely human self-consciousness. This self-consciousness finds its unique character in the fact that what the human being is for-itself–i.e. a self conception–constitutes what it is in-itself–i.e. its essence.1 To reframe it simply: what a human takes himself to be, is part of what makes him who he is. With all other animals this is not so. Thus, changes in the self-conception thus constitute real changes in the essence of the person.2
Yet, it doesn´t follow that the self-conception constitutes the essence of the person completely3, the self-conception will ideally correspond with reality–i.e. with who they really are in-themselves–and if it does not, then this misunderstanding itself constitutes their essence as a severe weakness.4 So a man who misrecognizes himself as a female does not become a female on the strength of the self-conception alone, but moreover is a male constituted in his essence by a fundamental misrecognition of his gender at the level of the self-conception, the self for-itself constitutes essentially but doesn´t exhaustively define the self in-itself.
Furthermore, the self-conception does not emerge sui generis from nature like hair or wisdom teeth, the self-conception or identity must be given to the self by another through a process of mutual recognition.5 In this process, one recognizes one´s own self-conception, in the recognition of another of oneself.6 Humans understand themselves to be for themselves—i.e. reflexively to self-consciousness—only by means of what they are for another—i.e. what others recognize them as being. 7 Or self-consciousness is mediated by the recognition of others, and correspondingly, we mediate the self-consciousness of others through our recognition of them. In this way, self consciousness is in-itself lacking, i.e. constituted by a desire for the other.8
The efficacy of communication of a self-conception through the process of mutual recognition varies positively with desire. It isn´t recognition alone that makes this process so powerful, but desire.9 If I walk up to a stranger and tell them they are an extra-terrestrial then they have, maybe for the first time in their lives, the option to take this self-conception as their own. But not really, because my telling them will have no force, or desire behind it. For Hegel, recognition gives the form, but desire is the matter of the communication of a self-conception. If the recognition is the rider, desire is the horse of this process.
The willingness to suffer and risk for an idea or self-conception is the measure of desire.10 So if I was willing to be tortured for my belief that the stranger is an extra-terrestrial, then he himself might start to take the claim more seriously. Because in seeing my suffering for an idea, I would communicate the idea by desire. And human beings are highly responsive to ideas animated in expressions of real desire. And real desire is cashed out in a willingness to risk and sacrifice ones own interests. And desire is the currency of the process of mutual recognition. A man who gives up everything to pursue a woman, though he be detestable, imposes his desire alone on her, if he has no other agreeable traits, and desire itself is sometimes enough. And he may prevail over a better suitor who isn´t willing to risk anything to court her.
In addition, mere identification of the self with the self conception, and even a willingness to risk or suffer for the self-conception is not enough to perfect specifically human self consciousness. A human still remains at the level of animality unless He is willing to die for the self-conception.11 Only then is spirit free. The self-conception only constitutes a free or rational human essence or identity if he is willing to sacrifice for the self-conception. If there is no ideational thing or role or status that I am willing to sacrifice my biological life for, then my essence as a person is not distinctively human, I am not yet a fully actualized Human Spirit. Hegel at his finest!
This means that development in the self-conception can only happen in community,12 where the self is given freedom to identify with, i.e. be willing to sacrifice and die for, specific ideas, roles, convictions that one is already recognized by others as possessing.13
This also means that a perfect recognizer wouldn´t simply need a perfect intellect, but a perfect will as well, and that: a perfect recognizer would thus perfectly communicate the recognition only with desire, and desire expressed in a willingness to risk all and to suffer all not just her own self-conception but to impress her perfect recognition on others. Thus we come to the surprising conclusion that both the perfect recognizer and the perfect recognized status or role would involve exhibiting desire through risk, suffering, and sacrifice. The highest role would be to die as a sacrifice, the highest recognizer would suffer immensely to offer this normative status to the recognized person so that they would be able to fulfill the role.
Further Explications on the Basis of the Argument:
(1) The Incarnation of Jesus Christ as the Perfect Expression and Transmission of Human Spirit (According to Hegel´s Notion)
Jesus´ own mission to redeem the world seems to correspond perfectly with Hegel´s theory here—i.e. that the form of humanity is only present when the human spirit is willing to sacrifice itself as a biological organism to preserve it´s own self-conception. An example of this is the primitive samauri code, where certain infractions of the code entailed that one could either take ones own life and remain a samauri, or live and be deprived of the self-conception—i.e. one would no longer be recognized as being, or ever having been a samauri. In this way, the form of human spirit is the willingness to die for an idea, and the matter is that for which one is willing to die. If one puts biological existence above spirit, then one both: is not an actualized human spirit, but also reason is not free in such a person, reason is chained to, rather than directing the biological organism. And modern society seems to have entered on a mission to deflate the possible matter of human life, i.e. religion, nation, ethnicity, family, etc. i.e. anything that might be worth dying for. And when these things are gone the form disappears as well. But if we try to imagine the most perfect human being, someone who exemplifies the human spirit most perfectly, wouldn´t He be willing to die for His identity that calls for his death. Wouldn´t He be willing to sacrifice Himself for being a Sacrifice himself? So the form and matter would form a perfect harmony. Wouldn´t this be the most perfect revelation, not just of Divine, but of Human Nature. And this perfection of His Identity as an expression of the most human self-consciousness is most readily seen from Hegel´s theory of recognition, rationality and humanity.
(2) Does Being Fully God translate to being Less fully Human? No!
This aspect of Hegelian philosophy really highlights also the importance of the recognition of God the Father, the Wise Men, St John the Baptist, and crucially of St Peter in the biblical text. Also of events like the Transfiguration–why did that occur?— that helped at least a few of the disciples recognize Jesus as God Incarnate. Hegel´s theory suggests this recognition was as necessary to His Human Nature as bones or muscles to carry the Cross to Calvary and offer Himself as a Sacrifice for the Redemption of the World.
Part of Jesus becoming man was throwing himself into the poverty of human form, and Hegel´s theory of recognition helps us to think about how the recognition of others constituted him as a human being, and how important that was for Him, as it is for any human. If we think about how hard it was even for the disciples to admit he was the Messiah, consider the sort of fortitude and perspicuity required to recognize Him as God Incarnate as they were standing face to face, or even after his Ascension.
Is it blasphemous to say that without being recognized at all as God Incarnate, he wouldn´t truly be God Incarnate in His essence? I don´t think so, at least not as regards the becoming of His Human Nature: Jesus could not have been mistaken about who He was, if he were, he would not be God, and this false-conception would tarnish His natural development. Yet, to be fully human he would be mistaken about himself without the proper recognition of others. Thus we can know that this must have been given. But recognizing Jesus Christ as God incarnate was no small matter, no one would believe it. Only Our Lady and St Joseph seemed to.
What we see in Scripture is Our Lord limiting himself to relying on the fullness of His Humanity as much as possible. So he could choose to learn a language the human way, where mistakes are essential to learning, or simply rely on his omniscience as God. Yet His strategy was to redeem through the adoption of the human condition and suffering it. Similarly we must believe he developed humanly, and that his consciousness of being a Human Pascal Lamb at the age of four was not the same of his consciousness of this reality at the age of seventeen. Or so I think. Jesus kicked and coo´d as a baby, and sang valiantly as a young man. He developed and grew as a human, his physiological and psychological form changed, and with it at least speaking from the human side, his self-conception, this must have been slowly growing, maturing.
But did something change in Jesus the moment he hears the cry of St John the Baptist,” Behold the Lamb of God, behold He who taketh away the Sin of the World?” I would say, yes, its not that he wasn´t the lamb of God before, or wasn´t aware or wasn’t going to be, but that hearing this from the forerunner, from his own relative, that made His Human Nature grow. That the reality that He was the chosen one to be sacrificed for the redemption of the world, that He grew into that role, in that moment, through the recognition of another near, if not perfect, recognizer. And He grew in this moment—if Hegel’s theory is right (of course it is!)— just as he grew physically by eating, because Jesus Christ was fully human.
(3) The Painful Price of Perfect Recognition: Our Lady of Sorrows
But this takes us back to Our Lady and her role and sorrows. From the very, very start, she is being prepared to recognize Him as a sacrifice, from the Myrrh of the Wisemen. She knew what it meant. The Prophecy of Simeon was partially regarding her own sorrow, not merely the death of Jesus Christ, but this prophecy was also to solidify and develop her own recognition of Our Lord which is the source of her profound sorrow for her entire life. Our Lady, from this vantage point is the psychological altar of Her Son. She is giving Him—through her recognition of Him her whole life, and there had to be many moments both spoken and unspoken, where she gave Him this sorrowful recognition, one is the 4th Station of the Cross for instance—acknowledges His Identity, His Self-Conception as a Human Sacrifice. This was a terrific strength to Our Lord, and Our Lady is also such a comfort to us in suffering for the same reason. She had, as a mother with the most tender heart toward her son, learn to will his death out of obedience to God, and love of all humankind. And not just to will it, but to communicate it to him so as to form Him for His Task. It´s heartbreaking to think about a mother needing to prepare her beloved Son for a horrible death, one she knew would afflict her terribly.
One Biblical Story that demonstrates just how Our Lady fulfilled her role as perfect recognizer is the Wedding at Cana. Here, Our Lord even protests performing a public miracle—and thus starting a chain of events leading toward his death— saying His time has not yet come. Yet, Our Lady overrides his opinion, she had, through a life of mortification and prayer learned to surrender to God in all things. And when she said, ”do whatever He tells you” to His disciples, it is Her only command in scripture!—the supreme Marian Law is obedience to the Divine Word! But when she says this, its as if she realizes She has to constitute Him through her recognition. It was the perfect occasion, a wedding is a metaphor for eternity, and the absence of wine a providential sign of his coming kingdom. To hesitate to seize this opportunity would communicate reluctance to give Him up, also a relative unimportance of His Task. But the crucial point according to Hegel is that Our Lady is willing His death in this episode, she is recognizing him through desire, and desire that is ready to suffer all. Our Lady, in this moment, shows her own hunger for their wedding banquet that can only be prepared by His Sacrifice. Her Heart is already breaking, yet, she, without thought of self, only wills more pain, and is somehow already celebrating the wedding feast at the same time. Yet it is this double-movement, ascending by movements of joy into sorrow, and sorrow into joy, that seems to imitate the lub-dub movement of the human heart itself. In the end, she said at Fatima, “My Immaculate Heart Will Triumph!” And it has and will.
Her Heart triumphs through being pierced by His Desire and His Recognition of Her Role. More than anyone in Human History, The Blessed Virgin conformed Her entire life to Roles—Beloved Daughter of the Eternal Father, Most Chaste Spouse of the Holy Ghost, Blessed Mother of the Divine Son— roles she discovered through the desires of the Three Divine Persons. The parallelism of the Wedding at Cana, and the Crucifixion in the Gospel of John constitutes the key not just to grasping the St John´s Gospel and even Revelation, but her role as new Eve. The Crucifixion was a Nuptial Ceremony between Our Lady and Our Lord. She was penetrated by His Word in Her recognition of Him, and recognizing His own recognition of Her as Bride, and became fruitful therethrough.
Our Lady being both United with Her Son in Marriage and elevated to the Queen of Heaven—kings in primitive societies would demonstrate their sovereignty by breaking the rules over which they were to preside, so its no surprise Our Lord commands cannibalism regarding His Own Flesh and then Marries His Mother, He Is King over Nature!—these are crucial to grasping her sorrows on that day. All of the elect will have found their self-conception in the Desire and Recognition of the Crucified Son of God. They became who they were through being recognized and loved by Him who was Crucified for them. This is painful. It should pierce our hearts and unite our sorrows with His own. Why? It shows us our sin, and our sin shows us His Love for us. There is this double movement in the heart.
But Our Lady didn´t sin, and thus didn´t sorrow over Her sins as He suffered on the Cross. Instead, I think her suffering had two sources (1) her knowledge of her own unworthiness of Immense Her Role as it was being clarified through His Passion and (2) that she could not give more, suffer more with Him who suffered —due to his Divinity—infinitely more than Our Lady. To know Him, His Desires, and His love and to get our self-conception from His Recognition of us as loved by Him and potentially Redeemed by Him should have these marks (1) recognition of unworthiness because of the gravity of Sin and of the paucity of the human frame itself and (2) suffering our inability to give Him more in the light of His Charity. We can only see our sin clearly as we are recognized by Him— or in the light of his benevolence toward us— being called and moving in the direction of Eternal Glory by his grace. The damned are haunted by His Desires and by His Recognition of them, and run away from His Person to flee. In such a state, its hard to feel gratitude at all towards Jesus Christ, much less pain about how little of His Love one can return to Him and others.
To close on this point, the hard thing about knowing and loving Jesus Christ is that He went so hard. He went so hard all in. And most of us don´t want to reciprocate that at all and don’t want to put ourselves in a position where we are even tempted to do so. And Hegel´s theory is that a self-conception is most forcefully pressed on human consciousness through desire, and desire expressed in a willingness to suffer for the identity. So we avoid thought of His Passion and what it could mean for us. Our Lord went all out on this Hegelian front, suffering infinitely for Our Sins in order to express His Loving Desire, in order to give us a new Self-Conception in and through His loving recognition of us. It´s His Desires that are so extreme and wild, and the force of His love so tyrannical. It is too much for most people, they want something half-assed. They want comforts or a deeper meaning to their life. Not realizing your best friend was tortured for your sins, expects you to stop torturing him asap, and wants you to walk in his footsteps on his path of sufferings. But the Saints engage in this process of mutual recognition with our Lord, of being transformed by His Desire, and reproducing His Desire in their hearts, recognizing Him in his Love, and being recognized by Him giving a new identity. Also here, Hegel´s theory of recognition and desire gives perhaps the most perspicuous explanation of the perfect psychological strategy of Our Lord´s death and redemption of the world.
(4) A Hegelian Altar Call: Reciprocal Recognition in Jesus Christ
This aspect of Hegel´s theory confirms the genius at the core of the evangelical movement: i.e. that its all about the personal relationship with Jesus. Or the charismatic movement: i.e. its all about the personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. Both claim that persons mediating a self-conception are the point of radical spiritual transformation. Christians lose sight of this focus at their own peril.
And I don´t think Hegel´s idea is a rival to the catholic sacramental idea, but instead, compliments it, supports it, and shows its transformative power when sacramental signs are the working of Him. Where do Protestants discover their self-conception as recognized by the Crucified Christ? In the Bible? That is a text, not a person. I’m not saying it cannot happen through Scripture. In contrast, I think scripture has a necessary role to play here in transmitting His Word to us, but the sufficient condition is extension of His Body, Merit, and Ministry through sacramental signs. At Mass we can stand before the representation of His Sacrifice, in the confessional the application of His Merits through His Priesthood. Or through Holy Orders or Marriage as well the dispensing of supernatural grace through the signifying of a Sacramental Sign and normative status. These are crucial places to learn of His Desire, to find His Recognition.
Hegel might suggest we ask to trouble-shoot what could be improved in our spiritual lives by asking: how do we let Him signify us as persons through sacraments? How is our study of scripture or our meditation at Mass letting Him shape our self-conception in light of His Desires? All of these things—word and sacraments— come into harmony through a Divine Person who loves us and desires good things for us and recognizes us according to His Plan. Thus part of the redemption and reordering of our Human Nature to Him is also receiving a more perfect and perfecting self-conception from and in Our Lord, and in changing who we take ourselves to be in Him, we are essentially changed as persons and born again of the Holy Spirit.
you can give me a tip and support my work here: https://buymeacoffee.com/sweller
SERIES: The Five Ways: die fünf Mutter-Gottesbeweise
The (Hegelian) Ontological Argument for The Existence of Mary
Coming Soon…
The Teleological Argument for the Existence of Mary
The Prime Matter Argument for the Existence of Mary
The Epistemological Argument for the Existence of Mary
“In this return into self, its object, as a determinate object, is for it; and the being-for-self of consciousness is the truth of its being, the essence of its actuality.” 171 “The self-conscious subject, in its being-for-self, is immediately this unity of itself as the universal and as the individual; it is the living unity of its own determinate being and its being as self-consciousness, and in this unity it is the essence.” (p. 444) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977
“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” (ibid, 178)
“Consciousness, in its untruth, is still burdened with an otherness; what it takes itself to be, it is not in truth, and this contradiction is its own doing, its own negation within itself.” (ibid, 232)
“The self, in its untruth, takes itself to be what it is not; its certainty is not the truth of its essence, and this disparity within itself is the movement of its own negation.” (ibid, 446)
“A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it” (ibid, 177).
“Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”
Hegel exhibits this principle in the dialectic of the master\slave, where the master is only master in being recognized as master by the slave. Without this recognition, his normative status disappears immediately.
“Self-consciousness is, to begin with, simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else… It is desire. The essence of desire is something other than self-consciousness, and through this otherness it has the character of a lack, a need.” (Ibid, 167).
“The individual has to make itself into a particular shape, to give itself reality through its own activity, and this activity is conditioned by the fact that it is desire, a striving to make itself what it is for itself in the eyes of the other.” (ibid, 199).
Hegel´s point is a little more complex that my formulation above. I don´t think I contradict his theory in any case. St Thomas says the objects of the will are outside the mind, and Hegel gets into the phenomenological reality of this conflict, that to desire at all is to posit the self as negative in relation to an obstacle with its origin in some lack. The primordial desire is for recognition, as we cannot be a self without this. “The activity of desire is the movement whereby the self posits itself as negative, as confronting an other, and in this negation it seeks to give itself reality, to make itself actual through the supersession of the other.” (ibid, 229) This idea is developed further as regards self-consciousness, that one can only prove oneself in the eyes of the other through sacrifice and risk, and this comes full circle that one can only be recognized as one is, as spirit, in another if one has risked ones life. “The self-conscious individual, in its striving, risks its own being; it is in this loss, this negation of itself, that it proves its desire and attains to the truth of its self-certainty in the eyes of the other.” (ibid, 432)
“And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [mere] being, not the immediate form in which it appears… but that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self.” (ibid, 187)
“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” (ibid,178)
I relied on Robert Brandoms article “The Structure of Desire and Recognition” for some of my formulations here.
You think like no else I read, this is incredibly thought provoking and beautifully said.