Sovereign Gratitude: Hegel on Religion and the Gift (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion as a Phenomenology
Filozofia, 2020
The present article takes up the issue of whether Hegel’s accounts of religion can be regarded as phenomenological analyses. This is a complex issue that concerns both the “Religion” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. At first, an account is given of how Hegel understands phenomenology. Then this is used as the basis for an evaluation of his analyses of religion in the Phenomenology and the Lectures. The thesis is that these two analyses, although separated by many years, in fact show clear signs of methodological continuity and can indeed be regarded as phenomenological at least on Hegel’s own definition. This reading offers us a way to resolve the long-standing problem of whether the Phenomenology of Spirit can be seen as a genuinely unified text. Moreover, it shows the little-recognized connection between Hegel’s early philosophy of religion and his later philosophy of religion from his Berlin lectures.
HEGEL AND RELIGION: SOME RECENT WRITINGS*
The Heythrop Journal, 1985
Although frequently pronounced to have no further influence, Hegel, God and religion are alike in that they simply seem unwilling to lie down and accept their fate. It was Hegel who first proclaimed the death of God to the modern world, and some of Hegel's better-known discipleschief among them Feuerbach and Marxwho considered his work to have hastened the demise of religion. God dead, and religion passing, it was not long before Hegel too was largely in eclipse. In this century it is not too unfair to suggest that all three have made something of a come-back. Certainly Hegel has. One hundred and fifty years after his death we are on the crest of a whole 'new wave' of Hegel studies, and, interestingly, a large number of them are concerned with his views on religion and the impact of those views on theology. It is my task here to describe some of the most recent of these books.
2005
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is one of the most important resources from the nineteenth century for theology as it faces the challenges of modernity and postmodernity. A critical edition of these lectures was published in the 1980s, which makes possible a study of the text on a level of accuracy and insight hitherto unattainable. The present book (by the editor and translator of the critical edition) engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel’s lectures, and it provides a close reading of the text as a whole. The first two chapters argue that Hegel’s philosophy of religion is a philosophical theology focused on the concept of spirit, and they provide an overview of his writings on religion prior to the philosophy of religion. The book analyses Hegel’s conception of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the co...
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019
Does philosophy comprehend religion, or does religion serve to mark the limits of what can be conceptually expressed by philosophy? Is religion the scene of the concept’s satisfaction? Its infinite longing? Or its transcendental frustration? This dilemma –characteristic of the respective “idealist” and “romantic” responses to the unresolved antinomies of Kant’s transcendental philosophy–was a central concern for G.W.F. Hegel from the years running roughly from 1793-1806. While Hegel begins his career espousing the latter, “romantic” view, he eventually settles on the former, “idealist” option. Why and how Hegel changes his mind on this matter (and good reasons we might have for pressing back against him) is not a matter of mere historical interest. Interrogation of Hegel’s understanding of the use of religious representations –particularly sacrifice –in the development of the idealist viewpoint might spur us to further reflection on philosophical uses of religious materials as they occur and recur in our discourses, opening a way of conceptualizing religion contrary both to Hegel’s idealist construction of spiritual figures, as well as romantic longing for a real but transcendent beyond. This paper concludes by sketching a counter-Hegelian interpretation of religious imagination as the phantasmatic register of the effects of non-dialectical negativity, a form of bricolage which responds to the “transcendental frustration” of the concept.
Religion in Hegel as the language of the community about itself
Abstract: Only if one considers in what sense, for Hegel, Logic and Religion have each to be the other in its own register, can one understand how Hegel’s idealism is sui generis, quite different from Kant’s or that of other post-Kantian idealists—a difference which comes strikingly home with the special meaning that myth must have in his case. The satisfaction of reason which the philosopher celebrates in the medium of the pure concept in the Logic is but the speculative counterpart (not the schema) of the reconciliation that the religious community celebrates in containing the evil which, since at issue for it is the identity of individuals as individuals, is endemic to it This is a reconciliation which would not be possible without reason—that is, without a language for which there can be a Logic—but is not itself logical. Hegel’s claim, though problematic, is not mystifying, and it can still speak to us.
Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel Scholarship
Religion Compass, 2008
Recent developments in Hegel scholarship have been dominated by two waves. Focusing on his complex conception of freedom, the first has transformed the dominant view of his ethical and political thought. The second, which has dramatic consequences for the interpretation of his philosophy of religion, reads Hegel as extending rather than repudiating Kant's critical project. These 'post-Kantian' interpretations have rejected the view of Hegel's logic as principally metaphysical in favor of a reading that focuses on the spontaneous and social character of thought.
Hegel on Christianity in the Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophy and Theology, 2017
The paper deals with Hegel's concept of Christianity in the Revealed Religion section of his _Phenomenology of Spirit_. It deals with the Trinity, Incarnation, and Creation. It shows how he blends orthodox and unorthodox teachings together in order to present the whole of Christian life. (The edited version of the paper can be found in the journal _Philosophy and Theology_. Due to contract stipulations the final, edited version cannot be duplicated here.)