Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Postmodernism and religion. The discussion continues to become increasingly rich and complex. In the background of much of it is Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, in which Hegel is one of his two prime paradigms. He introduced this term in 1949 in relation to Aristotle's completion of his ontology with a theology of the Unmoved Mover. When he returned to it in 1957, it was in the context of a seminar on Hegel's Science of Logic. There he described onto-theology as allowing God to enter philosophical discourse only on philosophy's terms and in the service of its project and complained, in the spirit of Pascal and Kierkegaard, that this God was religiously otiose. What he says there specifically about Hegel will best be understood after we see in what sense Hegel is a pantheist.
It is possible to date quite precisely the time when Hegel abandoned theism for good. Ironically, it was in 1795 in correspondence with his two friends from seminary days at Tübingen. Schelling and Hölderlin had become Fichte enthusiasts, as we see from letters they sent to Hegel early that year. On the basis of prepublication access to Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling wrote on January 5,
Philosophy is not yet at an end. Kant has provided the results. The premises are still missing. And who can understand the results without the premises? … Kant has swept everything away, but how is the crowd to notice? One must smash it to pieces before their very eyes, so they grasp it in their hands. The great Kantians now everywhere to be seen have got stuck on the letter … [;] the old superstition of so-called natural religion as well as of positive religion has in the minds of most already once more been combined with the Kantian letter. It is fun to see how quickly they get to the moral proof. Before you can turn around the deus ex machina springs forth, the personal individual Being who sits in Heaven above! Fichte will raise philosophy to a height at which even most of the hitherto Kantians will become giddy … . Now I am working on an ethic á la Spinoza (HL 29).
1 See the discussion below of Identity and Difference.
2 The works of Hegel (and letters to him) will be cited in the text by means of the following abbreviations:
A Addition or Zusatz. This signifies material taken from lecture notes to supplement Hegel's text of EL, PM, and PR.
DFS The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy. Trans. Harris, H. S. and Cerf, Walter. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977 Google Scholar.
EL The Encyclopedia Logic. Trans. Geraets, T. F., et al. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991 Google Scholar. First part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.
ETW Early Theological Writings. Trans. Knox, T. M.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971 Google Scholar.
FS Frühe Schriften. Band 1 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971 Google Scholar.
FK Faith and Knowledge. Trans. Cerf, Walter and Harris, H. S.. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977 Google Scholar.
HIN Hegel's Foreword to H. Fr. W. Hinrichs' Die Religion im inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft (1822) in Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel. Ed. Weiss, Frederick G.. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 Google Scholar.
HL Hegel: The Letters. Trans. Butler, Clark and Seiler, Christiane. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 Google Scholar.
H&S Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans. Haldane, E. S. and Simson, Frances H.. 3 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963 Google Scholar.
LHP Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825-26, Vol. 3. Trans. Brown, R. F. et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 Google Scholar.
LP Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, in vol. 3 of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Trans. Spiers, E. B. and Sanderson, J. Burdon. New York: Humanities Press, 1962 Google Scholar.
LPR Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Trans. Brown, R. F., et al. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984–1987 Google Scholar.
LWH Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Trans. Nisbet, H. B.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 Google Scholar.
PR Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Trans. Knox, T. M.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945 Google Scholar.
PM Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. Trans. Wallace, William and Miller, A.V.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 Google Scholar. Third part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.
PS Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Miller, A. V.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977 Google Scholar.
SL Science of Logic. Trans. Miller, A. V.. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969 Google Scholar.
3 See Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with the First and Second Introductions, trans. Heath, Peter and Lachs, John (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970)Google Scholar, and On the Vocation of a Scholar in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. Breazeale, Daniel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
4 Schelling's letter summarizes his own Fichtean essays of 1795-96, Of the I as Principle of Philosophy and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, essays Hegel would soon study sympathetically. For an English translation see The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, trans. Marti, Fritz (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.
5 A brief sketch of the main events is found in the Editor's Introduction to Fichte, , Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, trans. Breazeale, Daniel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)Google Scholar. This volume contains the 1798 essay that triggered the controversy, “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World,” and a couple of short pieces related to it.
6 This is from a 1796 text known as “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism,” translated in Harris, H. S., Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 511 Google Scholar. I accept the arguments of Pöggeler and Harris that pending a smoking gun to the contrary, this manuscript, which is in Hegel's hand, should be attributed to Hegel. See Harris, pp. 249-57. For pantheistic formulations in 1799-1800 drafts of the essay known as “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” see ETW, 253, 259-61, 264-69, and 278. In a slightly earlier draft from the same project, Hegel speaks of a “transubstantiation” of the disciples of Jesus, “an actual indwelling of the Father in the Son and of the Son in his disciples” such that like the Son they are “a modification” rather than “substances” because “there are not two substances.” FS, 304. For an overview of developments in the Jena period leading up to the Phenomenology, see Jaeschke, Walter, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, trans. Stewart, J. Michael and Hodgson, Peter C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 171–84Google Scholar.
7 Using ‘Concept’ rather than ‘Notion’ for ‘Begriff’. That whose life follows from its concept is, of course, the “object” of the ontological argument. Like Spinoza, Hegel is a vigorous defender of this argument in a quite un-Anselmian form. See SL 86-90, 705-708; EL¶¶51A and 193A; for the frequent references in LPR, see the indices to all three volumes under “ontological argument” and “proofs”.
8 Cf. ETW 176, from an 1800 draft of “The Positivity of the Christian Religion.”
9 For the early theological writings, see the passages cited in notes 6 and 8 above. For chapter 7 of the Phenomenology, see my History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), ch. 7Google Scholar.
10 Haldane and Simpson translate the Michelet edition of 1840, which is based on the complete manuscript of the Jena lectures, 1805-06, but also on materials, including student lecture notes, from various of the other eight times Hegel gave these lectures, in Heidelberg and Berlin.
11 For details about this controversy in which Jacobi directly identified Spinozism with atheism and claimed that Lessing had confessed on his deathbed to being a Spinozist, see Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 2-4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Beiser notes the following irony (pp. 44-5): “Nearly all the major figures of the classical Goethezeit-Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Herder, F. Schlegel, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling — became Spinoza enthusiasts in the wake of the controversy … [;] pantheism became, as Heine later put it, ‘the unofficial religion of Germany.’”
12 On Tholuck, see LPR 1:7-8. On the relation between Tholuck's charge and the 1827 lectures, see Merklinger, Philip M., Philosophy, Theology, and Hegel's Berlin Philosophy of Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), ch. 5Google Scholar.
13 Cf. PM, ¶573, where, after describing a variety of systems that are customarily called pantheistic, including Spinoza's, Hegel says, “The fault of all these modes of thought and systems is that they stop short of defining substance as subject and as spirit.” Emphasis added, using 'spirit’ rather than ‘mind’ for ‘Geist’. Cf. EL, Remark to ¶50 and SL 537.
14 Cf. LPR 1:344, n.163 (from 1824). The reference to identity philosophy is to Schelling's 1801 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, in which he assimilated, but not for the first time, Fichte with Spinoza and sought to integrate them in a higher identity. On Hegel's early response, see DFS, including Harris' helpful Introduction. His decisive break with the identity philosophy is usually found in the Preface to PS, with its complaint about a “monochromatic formalism” of the “night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.” In the very next paragraph, Hegel writes, “In my view … everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (PS 9-10).
15 In ¶573 of PM, Hegel says that “if the world were taken as it is, as everything, as the endless lot of empirical existence, then it would hardly have been even held possible to suppose a pantheism which asserted of such stuff that it is God.”
16 The acosmism defense of Spinoza also appears in EL, remark to ¶50 and in H&S 3:281-82. On the origin of the acosmic interpretation of Spinoza in earlier thinkers, see LPR 1:377, n.27.
17 Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. Rosenthal, M. L. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 94 Google Scholar.
18 This objection is also discussed in the Preface to the 1827 edition of the Encyclopedia, EL 8-10.
19 The Portable Nietzsche, ed Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 92 Google Scholar.
20 Here and subsequently ID = Identity and Difference, trans. Stambaugh, Joan (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)Google Scholar
21 See note 7 above.
22 See EL ¶¶79-82 for an account of speculation as the Aufhebung of dialectic.
23 The language of emptiness and fullness echoes Husserl's discussion in Logical Investigations of adequation in terms of fulfilled intentions. The rest or satisfaction implied by this fullness is what Jean-Luc Marion uses to distinguish idols from icons. See God Without Being, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
24 Critique of Pure Reason, A xiii-xiv, xx.
25 In EL ¶¶37-60, Hegel treats the critical philosophy not as the overcoming of empiricism but as its continuation and fulfillment. This means that it is not enough for Hegel to define subjectivity or spirit in terms of presence to self (LPR 1:370). As was already the case with Fichte and Schelling, the Hegelian cogito needs to have a different ontological status from the cogito of empiricism and the critical philosophy.
26 On the essential role of the distinction between human and divine knowers in Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves, see my essay, “In Defense of the Thing in Itself,” Kant-Studien, 59/1 (1968), 118–41Google Scholar.
27 Ironically, this citation comes in a passage in which Hegel is seeking to refute the charge that speculative philosophy is pantheism. He appeals to the Catholic theology as supportive of his view, failing to mention that it was precisely for statements like this that Eckhart was condemned by the church. The first two statements are to be found in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed McGinn, Bernard (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), pp. 270 and 261Google Scholar. The third is from Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, ed. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and McGinn, Bernard (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 203 Google Scholar.
28 Heine, Heinrich, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. Snodgrass, John (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 77–79 Google Scholar.
29 Chapter seven of PS is perhaps the most succinct statement of this passage from theistic religious consciousness to pantheistic philosophical self-consciousness. See my analysis in chapter 7 of History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology and “Hegel's Theory of Religious Knowledge” in my Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
30 See the satirical offer by Johannes Climacus to bow down and worship the system if only he could be assured that it was finished. Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:13, 106–109 Google Scholar.
31 See note 22 above.
32 I have altered the translation slightly, but left the translation of Geist as mind standing as appropriate in this context. Especially against the background of the Lutheran tradition in Germany, the religious overtones of the admonition to trust (Vertrauen) and faith (Glaube), not in God but in science and in themselves, are too conspicuous to overlook.
33 The Berlin version is to be found in Hegel, , Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), Vol 10 (1970), p. 404 Google Scholar.
34 The interior quotation is from Phil. 4:7. Whereas English translations usually render the Pauline νοῦς as understanding, Luther's translation, to which Hegel alludes, has Vernunft.
35 See PM ¶564; EL, addition to ¶140; LP 193-95; H&S 2:72-73, 134-35; LPR 1:381-82; and HIN 243.
36 See LPR 1:382, n.44 and 3:280.
37 Cf. the passage cited above from LPR 3:280-81 in which God remains secret and mysterious only to the Understanding, but not to Speculation. A similar contrast between the Understanding's limited and distorted grasp of freedom and love and a truly rational, speculative comprehension is central to Hegel's political thinking. See, for instance, PR ¶¶ 5-7, 158, 182-83, and 189, with remarks and additions.
38 The translation of Gottesdienst as “service of God” is misleading, since it is the ordinary word used on church bulletin boards for the Sunday moming worship service. The best treatment of Hegel's relation to the gnostic traditions is O'Regan, Cyril, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
39 Reason in Religion, p. 204.
40 This sense is often called “special” revelation to distinguish it from “general” revelation, on which natural theology rests, the manifestation of God that is available to properly functioning human reason. Special revelation has traditionally included not only the “mighty acts of God” in history, such as the covenants with Abraham and David, the exodus, the exile, the incarnation, and the atonement, but also the indirect speech acts through prophets and apostles, which eventually became canonized as the biblical texts, through which those events are rightly interpreted. On the notion of indirect divine speech acts, see Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Divine Discourse: Philosophical reflections on the claim that God speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Reason in Religion, pp. 287, 332.
42 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1:119–22Google Scholar.
43 I have done so elsewhere. See “Abraham and Hegel” in Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: The State University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Becoming A Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’ (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1996), especially ch. 7Google Scholar.
44 Both commandments are quotations from the Jewish Torah, Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19.18, given in answer to a question about the greatest commandment and presented as the foundation of “all the law and the prophets.”
45 See EL ¶24A3 and LPR 3:272-307.
46 The phrase is used by F. H. Bradley to describe his own very Hegelian ethics in Ethical Studies, 2nd. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1927)Google Scholar. Following Bradley, Knox translates Pflichten der Verhältnisse as “duties of [one's] station” in PR ¶150. Hegel's account is found in PM and, in greater detail, in PR. For the introduction of Sittlichkeit in PS, where it is more closely linked to Hegel's epistemic concerns, see my History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology, ch. 5.
47 For a detailed analysis, see my “Hegel and the Reformation” in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity.
48 The phrase is from Schiller's poem, “Resignation”.
49 Wood, Allen W., Hegel's Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 223 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 The Question Concerning Technology, trans. Lovitt, William (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 100–101 Google Scholar.
51 The closing words are the most famous line from the famous 1966 interview of Heidegger by Der Spiegel, used as the title of the English translation in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6/1 (Winter, 1977), p. 18 Google Scholar.
