Christ as the Mediation of the Other

Abstract

Abstract Karl Barth once said that we must always think three times before contradicting Hegel’s system, “because we might find that everything we are tempted to say in contradiction to it has already been said within it.”1 Hegel wanted his thought to mirror the full movement of life, and to Barth (avid moviegoer no less than Mozart aficionado) this movement proceeds like the film of the cinematograph, though one so extraordinary that it depicts “the rhythm of life itself,” running exhaustively through the fullness of history, capturing the “exact recollection” of the observed plenitude of being.2 Barth would find incredible Richard Rorty’s comment that the Phenomenology of Spirit is not so much “an argumentative procedure or a way of unifying subject and object, but simply a literary skill—skill at producing surprising gestalt switches by making smooth, rapid transitions from one terminology to another.”3 When Hegel concludes the magisterial section on absolute knowledge with the statement that here “Spirit has wound up the process of its embodiment,”4 he is not, as Rorty cavalierly suggests, recommending a new and improved vocabulary5 but is celebrating the complete infusion of truth into the dialectic of knowing. As Barth says, “Truth is necessary to [Hegel] and necessary to him in its unity, in its actuality, in the divine rigor inherent in it.”6