Self-Consciousness and Ontological Self-Grounding – A Preamble

"It is almost as if this slippery phenomenon
called "self-consciousness" lifted itself up
by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself
out of nothing." (Douglas Hofstadter)

In the burgeoning literature devoted to solving Leibniz's famous question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (for overviews, see Holt 2012; Goldschmidt 2013; Leslie & Kuhn 2013), one popular strategy is to assume that the 'something' is somehow ontologically self-grounding and thus explains its own existence. Influential in this regard were the publications of John Leslie's Value and Existence in 1979 and Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations in 1981. Crucial to both is the idea of self-grounding – or to be more precise: explanatory self-subsumption, whereby a law that explains why the world exists explains its own existence as well, thereby offering a total explanation of existence.
Despite this agreement, however, Leslie and Nozick had very different views on what this self-explaining law amounts to. For Leslie, being closer to traditional metaphysics, notably Platonism, the ultimate law is value. According to his "axiarchism", the universe exists because it is good that it exists, and this goodness is ultimately self-explaining because – as Leslie argues – it is good that there is goodness. Nozick, on the other hand, is closer to contemporary theorizing about the logic of possible worlds and formulates his ultimate law as a "principle of fecundity": all logical possibilities (i.e. all possible worlds) exist – a principle that, according to Nozick, is self-subsuming because it too is a logical possibility. As said, both approaches have been influential. Whereas Leslie's emphasis on value as the self-grounding ground of existence has notably influenced Nicholas Rescher, Nozick's principle of fecundity has had a more diffuse and widespread influence in recent theorizing about the existence of multiple worlds.

The absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question
It is surprising that although the idea of ontological self-grounding has become a popular answer to Leibniz's question, one important development of that idea has generally been overlooked in the recent literature. I mean the development this idea received in absolute idealism, where the primordial self-grounding entity – which supports the whole of existence – is identified with self-consciousness. Thus the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question can be summarized as follows: Everything exists because it is thought and/or experienced by an absolute Self who in turn exists because it thinks/experiences itself. Thus it is the Self's awareness of itself that lifts it – and thereby everything else – into existence. The crucial point about self-consciousness (individual human self-consciousness to begin with) is that it has a circular or self-referential structure, like a Russian nesting doll (a matryoshka) containing itself, or a series of such dolls where the smaller ones in turn contain the bigger ones. For absolute idealism, this self-containing structure of self-consciousness amounts to ontological self-grounding. That is to say: self-consciousness exists only because it is conscious of itself – thus it bootstraps itself into existence. We could say that it belongs to the essence of self-consciousness that it realizes itself, where "to realize" means both "to become conscious of" and "to let exist, to make real". Thus in self-consciousness esse and percipi coincide: it exists because it perceives itself. In this way, perhaps, self-consciousness could function as the self-grounding ground of existence as such.

If ontological self-grounding is a legitimate approach to answering Leibniz's question, as philosophers like Leslie and Nozick argue, then the self-grounding structure of self-consciousness must be taken very seriously – especially because self-consciousness is so familiar to us all. Apart from some neo-Humean sceptics, who profess not to know this experience, each of us knows intuitively what it feels like to be him- or herself, to be a self that knows itself as itself. As difficult as it might be to articulate this experience discursively, it is no less difficult to deny that we are all familiar with it in one way or another. I think this familiarity of self-consciousness pleads strongly in its favor as a possible solution to Leibniz's question. For at least with self-consciousness we have a direct experience of it, which cannot be said of the highly abstract and counter-intuitive principles invoked by Leslie and Nozick. With self-consciousness, then, if its self-grounding structure is borne out by closer analysis (a very big "if" I admit), we have at least some kind of empirical evidence that this kind of self-grounding is possible, indeed that it exists within each of us.

Cogito ergo sum?
No doubt there is a close connection here with the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Arguably, as Descartes pointed out, the only thing we know absolutely for certain is our own existence, because in our innermost self-consciousness we are immediately present to ourselves. According to Descartes, this absolute self-certainty enables us to non-arbitrarily stop the justificatory regress from reasons to ever more fundamental reasons. To justify our claims, we need premisses – but what justifies these premisses? It is clear that a regress (or vicious circle) ensues if we do not find at least one self-evident premiss, a self-authenticating truth that – so to speak – wears its veracity on its sleeve. It is hard to deny Descartes's insight that at least our own existence is self-evident, and that, in this sense, self-consciousness functions as a first (because self-grounding) ground of rational thought. Now absolute idealism asks: wouldn't it be neat if this capacity of self-consciousness to stop the justificatory regress applies equally to another regress, namely, the ontological regress? This is the regress that threatens when we ask Leibniz's question: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ground (cause or reason) of the fact that there is anything at all? If this ground is itself something that exists – and it is hard to see how this could be otherwise, since ex nihilo nihil fit – then its existence too must be explained, so that we must postulate an even more fundamental ground etc. As Nozick curtly put it: "Any factor introduced to explain why there is something will itself be part of the something to be explained." (Nozick 1981: 115)

Thus we are on our way to an ontological regress unless we find some ground of existence that grounds itself as well. Hence, obviously, the focus on ontological self-grounding in philosophers like Leslie and Nozick. Now absolute idealism asks: if self-consciousness stops the justificatory regress, does it perhaps also stop the ontological regress? Does the "ergo" in "cogito ergo sum" signify not just an inferential "therefore" but also a causal "therefore"? Such that I not only know that I exist because I think myself, but also that I exist because I think myself? This, indeed, is the wager of absolute idealism. Note that if this wager pays off, we are in the best epistemic position imaginable, because in that case our self-certainty does not remain just subjective certainty (as with Descartes) but immediately seizes an important objective truth, indeed, it then seizes the truth, i.e. the truth about the absolute, the self-grounding ground of existence as such. But, obviously, this requires a closer analysis of the structure of self-consciousness and a demonstration that this structure is indeed self-grounding, not just epistemically but ontologically as well. From the one we cannot automatically conclude the other; that would be to confuse epistemology with ontology. Ratio cognoscendi and ratio essendi need not coincide. 

A magical matryoshka
So let's take a closer look at the structure of self-consciousness and see if we can make sense of the idea that this structure facilitates ontological self-grounding. As a way into this, consider the metaphor I used earlier to describe the structure of self-consciousness: the Russian nesting doll that – paradoxically – contains itself. Each time one opens the doll one finds the same doll inside and so on ad infinitum. Now stipulate a condition C to the effect that this doll exists if and only if it is contained in a bigger one. Given C, the Russian doll cannot fail to exist – i.e. it exists necessarily – since it is always contained within a bigger one, namely, itself. Now this might all seem too paradoxical and too arbitrary to be taken seriously. Why, after all, would C obtain at all? And how could a Russian doll contain itself? That's obviously absurd. But when it comes to self-consciousness, these things lose a lot of their weirdness (or perhaps the weirdness remains, but we come to see that such a paradoxical entity actually exists). We know, after all, that self-consciousness is such that, in a sense, it contains itself. For to be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself as self-conscious: I'm aware of myself, and I'm aware of myself as aware of myself. Thus condition C applies trivially to self-consciousness: it exists if and only if is contained within itself – that is to say: it exists if and only if it is conscious of itself. Shouldn't we conclude then that, like the Russian doll under condition C, self-consciousness exists necessarily? And since C follows analytically from the nature of self-consciousness, shouldn't we conclude that the latter is therefore ontologically self-grounding?

Remaining questions
Although it is very difficult to spot the mistake in this reasoning (I can't, but perhaps I'm missing something), it is nevertheless not entirely convincing. It remains difficult to see how self-consciousness could raise itself into existence out of nothing. After all, ex nihilo nihil fit. Or should we say that such a transition from nothing to something never took place because self-consciousness – given its self-grounding nature – is eternal? That, after all, is what necessary existence usually means: if something cannot fail to exist, it must have existed always, without a beginning in time, and it will continue to exist forever. But if self-consciousness – because of its self-grounding nature – exists eternally, how then is it possible that we as self-conscious beings have emerged in time? Indeed, there is something very problematic about the relation between self-consciousness as the self-grounding ground of existence on the one hand and us empirical selves on the other. For even if individual human self-consciousness turns out to have a self-grounding structure, then that obviously does not tell us much about the self-grounding ground of existence as such. Clearly, none of us has brought himself or the universe into existence. As empirical individuals we are biologically conditioned, brought into existence by others. The self-grounding structure of self-consciousness may give us intuitive access to the kind of ontological self-grounding that can answer Leibniz's question, but to make full sense of this answer we have to generalize beyond ourselves. That is to say: we have to project self-consciousness to something that transcends us, the absolute, the very 'thing' that grounds existence as a whole, including ourselves. What justifies this move? Where do we find the evidence that backs up this 'absolutization' of self-consciousness? Is it possible to conceive of the entire physical universe as existing only in or for some absolute self-consciousness? Isn't consciousness causally dependent on physical reality, i.e. on the brain, to begin with? How to make sense of the mind-body relation within an absolute-idealist framework, where self-consciousness grounds even physical reality? 

Escher's Print Gallery: The observer
is included in the observed picture.

 And, finally, how does the self-grounding structure of individual human self-consciousness relate to the (as yet only hypothetical) absolute self-consciousness? If the latter is the ultimate self-grounding ground of existence, does that mean that – insofar as we are its effects – our individual self-consciousnesses are not truly self-grounding after all? Or can it be argued that individual self-consciousness is intrinsic to the absolute, such that the latter becomes self-aware only through the multiple self-consciousnesses of empirical individuals? These are some of the questions that have to be answered if the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question is to make sense. In the following weeks (or months? or years?) I would like to make a stab at answering them by investigating some of the philosophers who have developed similar ideas. Thus far I have managed to speak about absolute idealism without naming names, but obviously absolute idealism can boast a long tradition in both Western and Eastern philosophy. It is therefore to this tradition that we must turn if we want answers to our questions.

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
Looking at the history of philosophy, we of course find the position of absolute idealism most clearly argued and developed in post-Kantian German idealism, notably in the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Fichte kicked it off with his discovery (what Dieter Henrich called "Fichte's original insight") that we can only make sense of self-consciousness if we assume that the self does not exist apart from the consciousness it has of itself. As Fichte puts it: "What was I before I came to self-consciousness? The natural answer to this question is: I did not exist at all, for I was not an I. The I exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself." (Quoted in Neuhouser 1990: 46) For Fichte, then, the self exists only because it is conscious of itself, and in this way self-consciousness turns out to be ontologically self-grounding – a state of affairs for which Fichte coined the term "self-positing", saying things like: "The I originally and unconditionally posits its own existence." (Idem: 43) 

Fichte's concept of self-positing
introduced the idea of the onto-
logical self-grounding of self-
consciousness in German idealism.

Subsequently, for Schelling and Hegel, Fichte's discovery of self-positing provided a valuable insight into the nature of "the absolute", i.e. that which conditions everything else but is itself unconditioned. They understood – better perhaps than Fichte himself did – the potential of Fichte's insight as an answer to Leibniz's question. The self as such becomes the self-grounding ground of entire reality: everything that exists turns out to be ontologically dependent on the self-positing of the self. Schelling probably provided the most straightforward expression of this vision when he wrote: "The essence of the I is freedom, that is, it is not thinkable except inasmuch as it posits itself by its own absolute self-power, not, indeed, as any kind of something, but as sheer I... Freedom is only through itself and it encompasses the infinite... For the I, its freedom is neither more nor less than unconditional positing of reality in itself through its own absolute self-power... The I is I everywhere; it fills, as it were, the entire infinity... The I contains all being, all reality." (Schelling 1980: 84, 86, 89)

Absolute idealism in the Vedanta
It is therefore first and foremost to post-Kantian German idealism that we must turn. However, I think it is a mistake to construe absolute idealism narrowly as pertaining only to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. As a historical fact, absolute idealism was not first discovered by them; rather, it is a tradition of thought that stretches back almost three millennia. The idea of self-consciousness as the self-grounding ground of existence already appears in a semi-philosophically articulated form in the Hinduist philosophy of the Vedanta which derives from the Upanishads (the final part of the religious scriptures of the Vedas). In the Vedanta, Brahman as the ultimate ground of reality is identified with the Atman, the "universal Self" that is supposed to be present at the most fundamental level in each individual self-consciousness. Thus, with the formula "Atman is Brahman" the Vedantic thinkers encapsulated the core idea of absolute idealism, that of an absolute self-consciousness as the ultimate ground of reality, which as such manifests itself in each individual. Individual self-consciousness becomes in this way the privileged route to knowledge of the absolute.  

Adi Shankara (788-820 AD)

As the great Vedantic philosopher Shankara puts it: "[T]he existence of Brahman is known on the ground of its being the Self of every one. For every one is conscious of the existence of his Self, and never thinks "I am not"." (Quoted in Radhakrishnan & Moore 1967: 511) As this quote indicates, Shankara was well aware of the immediate self-certainty of self-consciousness, and anticipated Descartes’s insight into the privileged nature of the cogito as indubitable foundation of all knowledge. Thus Shankara writes: "All means of knowledge exist only as dependent on self-experience and since such experience is its own proof there is no necessity for proving the existence of the self." (Idem: 506) For Shankara, therefore, the absolute certainty of self-consciousness carries over into absolute certainty about the existence of Brahman, the absolute ground of reality. Indeed, according to the Vedanta, this self-certainty is nothing but the absolute certainty of Brahman about itself. When we know Brahman in our self-consciousness, it is really Brahman that knows itself through us. In this way the Vedanta develops the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question: Brahman, as pure self-consciousness, exists simply because it is aware of itself. Thus we find in the Upanishads utterances such as the following: "They say, since men think that, by the knowledge of Brahman, they become all, what, pray, was it that Brahman knew by which he became all? Brahman, indeed, was this in the beginning. It knew itself only as 'I am Brahman'. Therefore it became all." (From the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, quoted in Nikhilananda 2003: 191) Here the idea that Brahman bootstraps itself into existence through its awareness of itself is clearly expressed.

The hard problem of consciousness
Finally, there is one other philosophical tradition that I would like to utilize in order to substantiate the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question, namely, the contemporary debate about qualia and the "hard problem of consciousness", i.e. the apparent impossibility to explain qualia in exclusively physical terms. To see the relevance of this, consider the fact that the hard problem of consciousness is sometimes taken as an argument in favor of panpsychism, the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of reality and exists throughout the universe (Chalmers 1996; Strawson 2006). Interpreted in this way, the hard problem of consciousness constitutes an important (auxillary) argument in favor of the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz' question. In following this line of investigation, however, I am decisively stepping outside of the confines of German absolute idealism, because the truth of the matter is that the German idealists had very little of value to say about qualia or – as they called it – the "matter of sensation", to which they generally had a very disparaging attitude. For them, sensation meant first and foremost passivity (external stimulation of the senses) and thus unfreedom, whereas they took freedom or "self-determining activity" to be the true essence of self-consciousness. I think the German idealists were in this regard still very much indebted to the Cartesian attitude to qualia as mere "secondary qualities" lacking any true cognitive content, an attitude that was also prominent in Kant (see Critique of Pure Reason, A28-29, B44-45) and bequeathed by him to his immediate successors in German idealism. In this way, I think, the German idealists missed out on an important piece of evidence for the special nature of self-consciousness as the ultimate ground of reality. It is only with the contemporary debate about the special nature of qualia – and its relation to panpsychism – that this evidence is starting to be sufficiently appreciated.

Baron von Münchhausen pulling him-
self from the swamp by his own hair.
Can self-consciousnss do the same?

Click here for the follow-up of this article.

References
-Chalmer, David (1996), The Conscious Mind. Oxford: University of Oxford Press.
-Goldschmidt, Tryon (2013), The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? Routledge, New York.
-Holt, Jim (2013), Why Does The World Exist? One Man's Quest for the Big Answer. Profile Books, London.
-Leslie, J. (1979), Value and Existence. Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa.
-Leslie, J. & Kuhn, R.L. (2013), The Mystery of Existence. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester/West Sussex.
-Nikhilananda, S. (ed.) (2003), The Principal Upanishads. Dover Publications, Mineola N.Y.
-Nozick, Robert (1981), Philosophical Explanations. Belknap Press, Cambridge Mass.
-Radhakrishnan, S. & Moore, C.A. (1967), A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Princeton University Press.
-Schelling, F.W.J. (1980), "Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, or On the

Unconditional in Human Knowledge", in: Schelling, F.W.J. (1980), The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794-1796. Translation and commentary by Fritz Marti. Associated University Presses, Cranbury, New Jersey.
-Strawson, G. (2006), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? Imprint Academic: Exeter.

Chiastic metaphysics after the "Death of God" (Part 2): On the trail of the lost centre

The following text continues the investigation begun in: How to think like a moth - Thought after the "Death of God" (Part I)

As the movement of the moth's wings depends on the muscles in its thorax, so the conceptual movement of the chiasm depends on the power of its middle. What, then, is the grounding middle in the chiastic reversal from the loss of transcendence into the transcendence of loss? And aren't we here simply over-stretching our analogy with the moth, moving by mere metaphor from its body as the enabling middle of its wings to some hypothetical middle of the chiasm as the ground of its truth? Not quite. For the middle as the ground of truth really has deep roots in western philosophy, reaching from Parmenides and Aristotle, through medieval theology (Boventura), to Kant and Hegel. In general terms: the middle is that which holds everything together and which as such justifies the binding of predicates to subjects in judgements, thus grounding the “is” in any true judgement “S is P”. The turning of the periagoge in western philosophy is therefore to a large extent a turning to the middle, a spiralling of thought, turning around the middle in ever smaller circles. In that sense the philosophical concept of the centre can – with another chiasm – be called the central concept of western philosophy. A short overview:

The metaphysical logic of the middle

Parmenides invented philosophical idealism by founding the unity of thought and being in the middle that holds everything together in the sphere of the One. Aristotle then gave this Eleatic thought a more scientific form by thinking the middle as middle term, that is, as the conceptual bridge between subject and predicate in any true judgement, where this conceptual middle is conceived by Aristotle in terms of essential or substantial being (ousia), which for Aristotle is ultimately God, the Unmoved Mover as the final cause of the universe. Bonaventura, thinking in the Christian Middle Ages, harked back to Parmenides by conceiving God as “an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. Kant, in contrast, harked back to Aristotle but under the sign of modern subjectivity, focusing on the “third term” underlying the synthesis in any judgement, which he conceived as grounded in the transcendental apperception that binds concept and sensation together. For Kant, then, the transcendental subject played the same role that God played for Aristotle as the highest middle, underlying all true judgements. Of course, due to his critical limitations, Kant could not own up to this parallel with classical metaphysics, but Hegel had no such qualms. Hegel synthesized Aristotle and Kant by equating the transcendental subject with God as the final cause of the universe, adding the dialectical twist that this divine middle grounds not just the unity of subject and predicate but also their differentiation, as this is presupposed by their unification in judgement (thus judgement as Urteil is also arch-differentiation, Ur-Teilung). In that way Hegel was able to think God, the absolute subject, as self-mediating through negativity, as the self-moving middle between itself and the non-self.

I realize that this short history of the metaphysical logic of the middle is all too short and in need of serious elaboration if the traditional idea of the grounding middle is to be fully intelligible. I am sure that such an elaboration would reveal many important lacunae in the overview above (one interesting question, for example, is how Heidegger's view of the “open middle” as the place of Being relates to the metaphysical view of the middle as the locus of God as the ultimate guarantor of truth). Nevertheless, I do think I have shown that there is some point to my question for the middle of the chiasm (“the loss of transcendence is the transcendence of loss”) as the ground of its truth. One could say that in asking for that grounding middle I am in illustrious company and in line with the metaphysical tradition of western philosophy.

The loss of the centre as the centrality of loss?

Yet, this also indicates the trouble I am in. For it is precisely the crisis of the metaphysical tradition with which we are trying to come to terms here. The loss of transcendence, the “Death of God”, signifies precisely the falling away of the divine middle as the ultimate ground of truth. Thinking after the “Death of God”, we no longer believe that there is some transcendent centre of existence, some ultimate Substance or/and Subject that guarantees our access to The Truth, binding everything together into one meaningful whole. Thus the loss of transcendence, the “Death of God”, can be reformulated as the loss of the middle. And thus our chiasm can be reformulated as: the loss of the middle (centre) is the middle position (centrality) of loss. In other words, it is precisely the loss of the transcendent middle of the metaphysical tradition that must itself be thought as the new grounding middle, as the axis of the chiastic reversal that resurrects metaphysics in the moment of its fall, as the axis of the periagogic turning after the “Death of God”. But how is this possible? How can the loss of the middle be itself the new middle for thought to turn on?

The case of Christian conservatism
One interesting thing to notice here is that the “loss of the middle” is a well-known topos of Christian conservatism. Here the “loss of the middle” obviously means the modern loss of faith in Christ as the mediator between God and mankind, a loss that supposedly leaves society rudderless as it robs traditional authorities (e.g. kings and churches) of their religious mandate and undermines the moral substance that binds us together. According to conservatism, the loss of the Christian middle condemns society to what Adorno called “mediation without a middle” (although, of course, Adorno himself was by no means a conservative: he precisely accused conservatism of not being able to “hold out” the contradictions of modern life, so that conservatism regresses to pre-modern modes of thought and action). Without collective faith in Christ as the transcendent centre of society, social oppositions – like the one between labour and capital – can no longer be mediated by a reconciling middle but clash im-mediately, plunging society into chaos. This apocalyptic sentiment in the conservative lamentation of the loss of the middle is quite explicit in Yeats's famous poem The Second Coming, where the loss of the middle appears in the centre that “cannot hold”. The specifically Christian meaning of that centre for Yeats is of course obvious in the title of his poem, which indicates the longed for return of Christ as the living centre of society. Here is the first stanza:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Here, in the vision of Yeats's poem, the turning of the periagoge derails completely, moving in ever widening spirals (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”) away from the transcendent middle, deeper and deeper into illusion and evil, constantly further away from the True and the Good. Society (the “falcon”) no longer hears the call of its centre (the “falconer”), so that the centrifugal forces gain the upper hand, dissolving society into “mere anarchy”.

What does this conservative jeremiad about the loss of the Christian middle mean in the light of our attempt to think the loss of the transcendent centre chiastically as the transcendent centrality of loss? Doesn't this precisely mean that we are moving in the opposite direction, away from conservatism? And is this also a moving away from Christianity? Does this mean that we deny the social problems pointed out by conservatism? Of course, society is in serious difficulty: on the one hand shocking self-enrichment, on the other hand poverty, hunger, war, alienating individualism, loss of self in drink and drugs... The “ceremony of innocence is drowned” indeed. But is this due to the loss of the centre? 

The empty throne of the God-man
Let us, to gain more clarity here, take a closer look at the conservative topos of the loss of the Christian middle. One informative locus classicus in this regard is the book Loss of the Middle (Verlust the Mitte) by the art historian Hans Sedlmayr, published in the war ravaged Germany of 1948. In this book Sedlmayr analyses how the central position of man – religiously founded in the divine status of the man Jesus – slowly disappeared from modern art. Sedlmayr begins by pointing out how, until the 18th century, every art form used to be part of a sacred Gesamtkunstwerk in which divine man occupied the central place – a Gesamtkunstwerk formed by the complex of church and palace. In the following centuries, however, the various art forms gained a life of their own, becoming ‘autonomous’ by breaking away from the sacred and humanistic context of Christianity. Harking back to Blaise Pascal – who said “Leaving the middle means leaving humanity” – Sedlmayr analyses this development as a dehumanization of art. The inhuman comes to the fore in modern art: the indifference of nature and matter, the rapacious development of technology and industry, the self-reflective and abstract forms of autonomous art. In this way, Sedlmayr says, art reflects a broader social process of loss of centre, the downfall of Christian humanism. Art is not able to reverse that process (with respect to underlying social processes, art is powerless). Nevertheless, according to Sedlmayr, art still has a task here. In all its inhumanity, modern art has the crucial task of keeping the memory of the lost centre alive for future generations: “Then at least the awareness must stay alive, that the lost centre is the throne left empty for the perfect human, the God-man.” (Sedlmayr 1948: 248)

“sitting on a mountain of negations”
I must admit that I find this a beautiful, fascinating image: the lost centre in modern art as an empty throne – a throne that by its very emptiness refers to the missing king. But it is also this image which for me manifests the paradox of Christian conservatism. For the lost centre as the empty throne of the divine man? Is this not par excellence the empty cross, referring to the removed, dead body of the God-man Christ? Is this divine throne not Golgotha, the “mountain of skulls” on which the crucified Jesus throned, crowned with a wreath of thorns? I am reminded here of the negative theology of the Indian logician Adi Shankara, who painted a picture of Brahman as a God without attributes, sitting on a mountain of negations. Isn’t Golgotha that mountain? Isn’t the cross of Jesus precisely the cross of negation, referring back to the crossed out being of his mortal flesh? A picture means a thousand words, they say. Is this not true here? Doesn’t the picture of Golgotha make clear in one stroke that the centre as the throne of the divine man must be empty, that this emptiness necessarily follows from the core of the Christian doctrine? For was the sacrifice of Christ as Mediator not necessary to reconcile man with God and thereby with his fellow man? Is the loss of the centre in this sense not precisely the precondition of the unity of the Christian community, its unification in the Holy Spirit? In fact this is precisely what Christ himself said according to John: “it is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Holy Spirit [Paraclete, Comforter] will not come unto you, and if I go, I will send Him to you.” (John 16:7)

Hegel on the vanishing mediator
In this regard Christian conservatives should have listened better to one of their heroes, namely Hegel (who could sublate all earthly contradictions in the thought of the Absolute Spirit, thereby in practice leaving everything as it was, to the delight of the Prussian regime). In the Spirit of Christianity Hegel explains that as long as Jesus lived among his followers, he formed a “dividing wall” (“Scheidewand”) on the one hand between the followers themselves, and on the other between them and God:

“As long as he lived among them, they were only believers; for they were not based on themselves; Jesus was their teacher and master, an individual centre on which they depended; they did not yet have their own, independent life; the Spirit of Jesus ruled them; but after his removal this objectivity, this dividing wall between them and God, also fell away; and the Spirit of God was able to revive her whole being.” (Geist des Christentums, p.384)

In this regard Hegel was undoubtedly one of the German children of Luther, who deprived the Catholic priest of his mediator function in order to make the relationship between believer and God im-mediate. In this Protestant sense, Jesus is portrayed by Hegel as “the good priest” who makes himself superfluous and disappears into the relation between God and man (in other words: the only good priest is a dead priest, or in terms of Yeats: the only good centre is a dead centre). But one would underestimate the importance for Hegel of Jesus as vanishing mediator if one sees here only the influence of Luther. In fact, the concept of the vanishing mediator is an intrinsic part of Hegel’s dialectic, which is after all the atoning mediation of opposites. To truly bring opposites together, the mediator must – like Jesus – disappear from their midst. This is clearly argued by the Hegel scholar Herbert Scheit, who notes concerning the above passage of Hegel on the necessity of Jesus’ disappearance:

“This applies to every mediation, if it really wants to earn that name: mediation implies not just a third, a middle, it sublates itself in the unit of the mediated ones, which is then a “mediated immediacy”.” (Scheit 1973: 183, n. 207)

For Hegel, then, the goal of every mediation is what he calls “mediated immediacy”, the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. In that sense one can say, referring to Hegel, that the vanishing mediator is a universal given, or rather a universal absence, a disappearance that is ‘active’ in every process of mediation.

More about chiastic metaphysics and the loss of the middle next time. Apparently, I have to postpone kicking Hegel's but to some future occassion.

References
-Sedlmayer, Hans (1948), Verlust der Mitte. Salzburg/Wien, Müller.
-Scheit, Herbert (1973), Geist und Gemeinde: Zum Verhältnis von Religion und Politik bei Hegel, München und Salzburg, Verlag Anton Pustet.