What you are calling the metaphysical definition of god is not how Hegel characterizes thought thinking itself.

I have explained what Hegel means by thought thinking itself.

It is indeed an infinite thinking. But as Hegel understands infinite thinking it is a thinking engendered by a finite intellect.

Again, I have shown how this is so for Hegel.

It would be a mistake to believe that this infinite thinking has anything to do with a god.

In fact, god’s intellect typically understood as omniscient is for this reason incapable of being an infinite thinking in the Hegelian sense of such thinking.

Why, you ask?

Because Hegel’s infinite thinking is not omniscient.

How so, you ask?

I guess I will have to explain once again.

Infinite thinking is a thinking that first has to come to its own impasse. Without the impasse there can be no infinite thinking.

In fact, this impasse is nothing other than what Hegel calls the bad infinite. It is the infinite striving that marks reason as irrational since it is a reason that makes no progress.

This impasse appears as a circling of thought determinations or a circling of the content of thought. We see this at every point in Hegel’s expositions of speculative thought. This is the dialectic.

But this dialectic is not just a circling of thought content. This dialectic also exhibits a form. In fact, it exhibits what Hegel calls absolute or infinite form.

This circle is an absolute or infinite circle because it is self-generated.

More precisely, the self-generation involves mutually vanishing and resurrecting finite determinations. Finite determinations made fluid is infinite thinking.

You will notice that here god is nowhere to be found. All this happens within the finite human intellect or the intellect of Hegel’s reader.

So, for such a reader, being vanishes giving way to nothing. Nothing vanishes and in this way being is resurrect.

This is the first case of infinite thinking in the Logic. It is something we with our finite intellect are able to think.

The infinite is in this way deflated simply marking a thinking that thinks in a self-generated circle.

Thinking that thinks in a circle is for Hegel self-thinking thought. It is infinite thinking.

The common understanding sees such thinking as a breakdown of reason. It sees thinking in circles as irrational. It sees it as the bad infinite.

How do we get from an understanding of the dialectic as a bad infinite to an understanding of the dialectic as the true infinite?

All we need to do as finite intellects is shift our point of view.

When Hegel says that the dialectic is not just a negative but a positive result what he is inviting us to do is shift our attention from the circling of the vanishing or self-negating finite moments which is the content of the dialectic to the circle as the coherent and in this way positive form of this circling.

This circle is taken by finite intellect to exhibit the absolute or infinite form of its own self-thinking.

In this way, infinite thinking is something done by the finite intellect.

This simple shift from attending to the circling to attending to the circle transforms a negative into a positive result. It transforms the bad infinite into the true infinite.

This means that the bad and true infinite are simply two perspectives on the dialectic.

Hegel’s innovation was to discover the way the second perspective on the dialectic enables reason to break through its own irrationality at what had appeared to be reason’s own limits in this way exhibiting a new conception of reason, a conception of reason that actually is able to progress as an infinite self-thinking rather than to end up stuck in the impasse of its own infinite self-thinking.

So, those who might prefer a theological reading of Hegel cannot be saved by Aristotle.

Aristotle may have referenced a thinking god or an infinite intellect that thinks infinite thoughts.

But you will not find Hegel referencing an infinite intellect.

When Hegel takes up intellect as a topic in the Encyclopedia it is the finite intellect that he discusses.

For Hegel, there is no such thing as an infinite intellect.

You will not find any reference to intellect as infinite except parenthetically when Hegel represents god.

For Hegel, infinite intellect does not exist.

And because it does not exist, for Hegel, the god of religion does not exist as a determination to be found anywhere in Hegel’s system.

God only appears as a representation of absolute spirit. God is not absolute spirit as it is as a proper speculative truth.

Hegel provides a clue that should not be ignored.

The Logic ends with the absolute idea.

Is this god as thought thinking itself?

No, it is not.

The absolute idea ends up being a discourse on method, on the method employed by Hegel’s readers as they engage in the infinite self-thinking that is the Logic.

For the absolute idea to be a discourse on god, god would have to be nothing but our method of thinking.

Is there a theological notion that has god as no more than our method of thinking?

• Alan