An Sich - Für Sich Distinction

The an sich / für sich distinction, drawn from Hegel's Logic, marks the difference between something existing "in itself" (implicitly, as a latent potentiality not yet reflexively posited) and something existing "for itself" (explicitly, as a self-aware or self-posited actuality). In Boothby's deployment of this distinction in Embracing the Void, the terms are pressed into service to diagnose the structural innovation of Christian religiosity: pagans and Jews, on his account, maintained a relationship to the divine that was an sich — gods or God were presupposed as a background metaphysical reality, a rough ontological frame, while the actual substance of religious life consisted in ritual, ethical practice, and communal action. What Christianity uniquely introduces is the elevation of belief für sich — belief reflexively turned toward itself, belief that takes itself as its own explicit content and object. The act of believing, rather than what is believed in, becomes the central religious fact.

This formal shift is not innocent or merely structural: for Boothby, it marks the mechanism by which Christianity constitutes itself as an ideological formation in the strong sense. Once belief becomes für sich — once the subjective act of believing is foregrounded over the content or practice — it functions as a social bond and as a defense against the radical openness of the unknown Other (the abyss that Jesus's message of love toward the neighbor actually demands). The church, on this reading, betrays the kernel of Christ's teaching precisely by installing the für sich structure of belief as its organizing principle, converting an ethics of the Other into an ideology of self-referential communal identification.

This concept appears in Boothby's Embracing the Void (slug: diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred) as part of a broader argument about the ideological structure of Christian belief. The Hegelian an sich / für sich distinction serves here as the conceptual hinge between two cross-referenced canonical concepts: Ideology and Fetishistic Disavowal. The für sich elevation of belief maps directly onto the ideological operation described in the Ideology synthesis: ideology functions not through what people consciously think but through the reflexive, self-sustaining structure of their participation — here, believing as such becomes the operative social glue, independent of content. This is why the church can betray Jesus's ethics while formally preserving his name. Similarly, Fetishistic Disavowal is structurally implicated: the für sich posture of Christian belief enacts the "I know very well, but nevertheless…" split — the believer may acknowledge the radical demand of the neighbor-love at the core of Jesus's teaching, yet the institutional form of belief-for-itself functions as the fetish that veils and domesticates that traumatic kernel.

The concept also resonates with Form as a cross-reference: Boothby's point is precisely that the form of religious life (reflexive, for-itself belief) has become more decisive than the content (what is believed, or the ethics of love). This parallels the broader corpus argument that form can betray or exceed content — the Hegelian-Marxist insight that the shape social relations take is more ideologically operative than their ostensible meaning. The an sich / für sich distinction thus functions in this text as a diagnostic instrument of ideology critique applied to the history of religion, positioning Christianity's formal innovation as the very mechanism of its ideological betrayal.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.164)

To characterize it, we can again lean upon the Hegelian distinction between an sich and für sich. The pagan Greeks generally believed that something like gods existed... But such beliefs merely provide the rough frame for the central reality of pagan and Jewish religious life.

The phrase "rough frame" is theoretically loaded: it assigns the an sich mode of belief the status of a mere background condition — a structural presupposition rather than an explicit content — which sets up the für sich elevation of belief in Christianity as a formal revolution. By contrast, calling pagan and Jewish belief only a "frame" for the "central reality" of religious life implicitly argues that practice (ritual, ethics, community) is the substance, and that Christianity's innovation is to displace that substance with the reflexive form of believing itself.