Creation, Humanity, and Evil

God creates by ‘releasing’ the otherness that is intrinsic to the divine life into actual, independent existence, which is the world vis-à-vis God. The world divides into the realms of nature and finite spirit (humanity). God’s wisdom is at work in both realms, but a free and conscious relationship to God is possible only in the latter. Estrangement, self-securing, and evil are the condition of possibility of free relationships, and thus Hegel’s view of human nature takes on a tragic aspect, as is evident from his interpretation of the story of the fall in the book of Genesis. Whether his understanding of evil as the distortion of knowledge is sufficiently radical is a question with which the chapter ends.