Robert Williams, who sadly died not long after the publication of the book under review, played an important role in the recent revival of interest in the philosophy of Hegel, becoming well known for books and articles, especially in relation to the theme of Hegel's concept of Anerkennung – ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘recognition’. Indeed, in two books from the 1990s (Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (1992) and Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (1998) ), Williams was one of the first within the English-speaking world to draw attention to this now widely discussed concept. For Hegel recognition occurs between human subjects and is normatively mutual, but in a deeper sense than may be immediately apparent. It is not a simple moral imperative that one should recognize/acknowledge other subjects as subjects. Rather, withholding recognition from others is ultimately self-defeating because being embedded within networks of mutual acts of recognition is essential to the very constitution of a subject as a subject.

This focus on recognition has shone light on otherwise mysterious aspects of Hegel's philosophy. For example, a ‘recognitive’ approach to the notion of the ‘spirit’ (Geist), which effectively differentiates human beings from the rest of nature, promises to rid that notion of any ‘spiritualist’ commitment to immaterial substances. On one level, Geist is simply constituted by the ensembles of recognitive relations linking humans into definite culturally shaped social patterns found within historical communities. That is, spirit has and must have a necessarily objective form – what Hegel called ‘objective spirit’ – and there is just no place here for any isolated ‘Cartesian’ immaterial subject. Next, it promises to give some concrete meaning to Hegel's otherwise puzzling and seemingly self-contradicting formulae, as in Hegel's formula of being ‘with oneself’ or ‘at home with oneself’ (bei sich) ‘in another’ (im anderen). As Hegel's writings are riddled (in both senses) with odd, seemingly paradoxical formulae, approaching them in relation to the theme of recognition promises to render these less mysterious.

Given the thesis of the fundamentally social grounding of the self at the heart of the notion of recognition, it is not surprising that Williams's initial studies were directed at the notion's broadly ethical and social features. His interests have, however, always had a predominantly religious focus, and more recently he has been applying the recognitive approach more directly to the theological and metaphysical dimensions of Hegel's philosophy. In the book under review, the themes of which draw on essays in an earlier collection (Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche (2012) ), these two dimensions are directly united in what Williams refers to as Hegel's ‘ontotheology’.

In these works Williams presents Hegel as an antidote to the nihilistic tendencies of modern life, ‘the death of God’. Williams's critique of nihilism has a broad, somewhat Heideggerian flavour, with Nietzsche treated as an acute diagnostician of a process traceable back to Plato, and culminating in the type of abstract rationalism dominant in modernity. But while Hegel and Nietzsche share similar diagnoses of nihilism, only Hegel has a response to it. It is within this broader and deeper sense of the nihilistic rationalism of modern European life that Kant is portrayed negatively as encasing reason with a rigid framework of a nihilistically abstract and dichotomizing faculty, ‘the understanding’. Two sources of this negative portrayal of Kant are worth underlining. On the one hand, Hegel is positioned directly against Kant as aiming to restore ontotheology in the face of Kant's destruction of it, by restoring the traditional proofs of God in the face of Kant's critiques; equally importantly, however, Williams aims to counter those contemporary readings of Hegel which, to his mind, have over-assimilated Hegel to the Kantian ‘frame’, rendering him complicit within contemporary nihilism, rather than providing an antidote to it.

Here the Hegel interpreter cast as Williams's bête noire is Robert Pippin, who, in the last two or three decades, has led an effort to free Hegel from various unwanted metaphysical doctrines (such as any immaterialist understandings of spirit) by stressing the continuity of Hegel's project with Kant's critical philosophy. In this way, Pippin has stimulated interest in Hegel among analytically trained philosophers who would have been turned off by the more traditional metaphysically extravagant accounts of his philosophy. However, it is not that Williams denies any continuity between Hegel and Kant, treating Hegel as a ‘post-critical’ beneficiary of Kant's critique of traditional ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics, and of a theology that portrays God as a type of ‘otherworldly cosmic monarch’ (13). Hegel's critical appropriation of Kant's critique allows him to construct a new form of metaphysics that is able to retrieve ontotheology, but this all means that Williams must walk a tight-rope and avoid the traps of traditional metaphysics and theology on the one side and what he takes to be the ‘anti-metaphysical’ consequences of Pippin-like readings on the other. This will be a theme we will return to below; however, it should be noted that Williams does not seem to take into account approaches within Hegel's philosophy of religion, that of Thomas A. Lewis in Religion, Modernity and Politics in Hegel (2014) being, perhaps, the best known, which attempt to combine the theological content of Hegel's philosophy with a more Pippin-like attitude to Hegel's metaphysics. In contrast, Williams tends to rely on an assumption shared by other critics of Pippin, such as Frederick Beiser (155, n. 22), that Hegel's theology simply demands a commitment to a more robust, anti-Kantian metaphysics.

In the first part of the book under review Williams exposits Hegel's writings on the proofs of God, taken from a text on which Hegel was working when he died as well as his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and relates them to his Science of Logic. This part is thus organized into three chapters: ‘Kant's Attack on and Hegel's Renewal of Ontotheology’; ‘Recasting the Proofs as Elevation to God’, which effectively looks at Hegel's treatment of the Cosmological and Theological Proofs; and ‘The Ontological Proof’, stressing Hegel's critique of Kant's logic and metaphysics throughout.

It must be said that these chapters are not easy reading. The strengths of Williams's earlier work had resided in his subtle and convincing descriptions of intersubjective acts of recognition portrayed within a broadly phenomenological perspective. Here, relating Hegel's discussion of the proofs of God to material in Hegel's Logic means that the discussion invariably remains at a very high level of abstraction. I have mentioned how at least one of Hegel's odd and seemingly self-contradictory formulae might be rendered more meaningful by being placed in more concrete contexts, such as that of the dynamics involved between subjects in relations of mutual recognition. Here, however, Williams tends to leave Hegel's formulations, such as that concerning the way ‘concept and existence are both irreducibly different and dialectically inseparable’ (10) or his account of ‘the unity in and through difference of concept and objectivity’ (8), to do the necessary work themselves. They are explained, but usually in terms that are equally abstract and puzzling. Analytically trained readers especially might be left with the impression that when such formulae are called upon to resolve some philosophical issue, one gets little more than a suggestive but ultimately unsatisfying verbal resolution.

Part II of the book, ‘Hegel on the Personhood of God’, is again divided into three chapters: ‘Hegel on Persons and Personhood’, ‘The Personhood of the Absolute in the Logic’, and ‘The Recognitive Personhood of Absolute Spirit’. Here, given the focus on ‘persons’ and ‘personhood’, one might expect that Williams returns to the more familiar theme of interpersonal recognition, but this really only occurs in the final chapter, which is to this reader by far the best in the book. Here Williams uses a more finely grained exploration of the dynamics of recognition in relation to Hegel's trinitarian theology and his ‘kenotic’ conception of God, especially in relation to Hegel's discussion of the ‘cultus’. However, is this theology so clearly tied to the type of metaphysics to which Williams links it? One finds a similar account of the theology involved, with a focus on recognition, the trinity, and the kenotic conception of God, but without Williams's antagonism to Pippin-like versions of ‘post-Kantianism’, in Paolo Diego Bubbio's God and Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism (2017), for example.

The first two earlier chapters of Part II again seek to make the metaphysical connections via Hegel's Logic. ‘Hegel on Persons and Personhood’ unfolds against the background of the split within the Hegelian movement after Hegel's death, between a traditional metaphysical and theological reading of Hegel from the ‘right’ and the anthropological reduction from the left. Williams thinks both sides get Hegel wrong, and offers his own interpretation as an extension of the less well-known ‘centre Hegelian’ position of Karl Ludwig Michelet. The issue of ‘personhood’ is central here because the right Hegelians, ignoring the theme of recognition, had reduced God's personhood to that of a person (the ‘cosmic monarch’), while the left eliminated personhood entirely from his account of God, leaving a Spinozistic impersonal substance that is easily reduced to an atheist materialism. The theme of recognition is seen as crucial here, but now on the somewhat more difficult terrain of the mutual recognition between God and his created subjects. One distinctive feature of Williams's reading here in contrast to similarly ‘metaphysical’ readings is his insistence on the importance of Hegel's often-ignored Subjective Logic within the Science of Logic, and in particular Hegel's discussion of ‘the Concept’ and its moment of ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit). Williams stresses how the concept ‘frames and elaborates Hegel's concept of person and his doctrine of personhood, including the personhood of God’ (168–169), but this makes his tight-rope walk between the post-Kantians and the traditionalists particularly difficult, as it brings in obvious Kantian themes found in Hegel's account of ‘the Concept’. Thus Williams has to secure Hegel's Kant-influenced critique of traditional metaphysics while keeping this Kantian influence to a minimum. I think a symptom of the difficulty is manifest in his tendency to ignore much of what Hegel says positively in this section about Kant's critical project, and about the importance of the role of his notion of the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. (Compare, for example: ‘It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the “I think” or of self-consciousness’ (G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, George diGiovanni (tr.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 515); or: ‘we find in a fundamental principle of Kantian philosophy the justification for turning to the nature of the “I” in order to learn what the concept is’ (ibid., 516).) It is the link between the Kantian theme of apperception and Hegel's notion of spirit that is of central importance for Pippin, and one looks for some alternative account of what it is that enables Williams to make use of Kant's critique of traditional metaphysics within the transcendental analytic.

As indicated earlier, the structure and style of Williams's book will make it a difficult read for a reader coming to his work for the first time, especially one not familiar with Hegel's own writings. While this will surely be an important book within ongoing debates about Hegel's philosophy of religion, for readers new to Williams, and interested in the general themes being investigated here, his more accessible 2012 collection of essays would be a better place to start.