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IV. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s Philosophy of Religion (1770-1831) 1. Hegel’s Concept of History • Within Enlightenment (Deism, Lessing, Kant) and its concept of religion founded upon reason, Hegel aims for a mediation between philosophical reason and history as the foundation of concrete religion. • Like Kant, Hegel develops a concept of religion which is a criteria for historical religions, but also this concept pertains historically established „positive“ religion. Hegel’s Concept of the Absolute’s History against Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch” • Lessing: 1777 tract On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power: “Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” Hegel’s concept of necessary truths does not exclude, but contrarily includes accidental truths of history. Necessary truth is the necessary being → the Absolute must necessarily present itself in history, in its “otherness”; being in its other the Absolute is identical with itself (incarnation). The Absolute in itself is self-mediation and therefore, it knows difference and otherness – religiously speaking: it is Trinity. 2. Hegel‘s Science of Logic - Wissenschaft der Logik 1812 • SL develops categories (determinations) of thinking (Kant: omnitudo realitatis); these categories are categories of what is true. They are objective (Aristotle) and subjective (Kant), human and absolute – absolute because truth in its final form can be nothing but definitive, absolute, divine. • These categories pertain to what religion calls God. • In its theological dimension, Hegel‘s Phil. of Rel. takes these categories for granted. 2. The Affirmative Infinity • Enlightenment puts infinity beyond the finite, unattainable by reason. One cannot permit infinity‘s presence in history (Lessing). Hegel: this infinity is in fact limited by the “ugly ditch” (Lessing) and by the insuperable boundary between itself and the finite, accidental, relative. But being limited denotes finitude. Hegel’s conclusion: Enlightenment does not really think the infinite, but a finite infinity. The real or affirmative Infinity is not limited by its otherness, the finite; it rather contains the difference between itself, the infinite, and the finite; it is present and manifest itself in the finite - which is identical with itself in its own otherness: the finite. The same dialectic is applicable to all kinds of attributes which usually define God: the absolute, unity, necessity, omnipotent, eternal…. 2. Triadic Concept of the Absolute • Being (indeterminateness, immediacy, no differentiation), Nothing (otherness, contradiction, mediation), Becoming (immediacy of identity in difference) – • are the primordial, elementary movement of pure thought which determines the absolute: cf. Parmenides (being), Buddhism (nothing), Heraclites (becoming). • The Science of Logic develops more triadic structures which prefigure the absolute’s triadic self-mediation: notion-objectivity-idea; notion-judgment-syllogism, universal notion, particular notion, individual (universality-particularity-individuality)… • Logic is the first part of the whole triadic system: Logic (realm of pure thought), Real-Philosophies: Philosophy of Nature, of Spirit – Spirit : subjective, objective and absolute spirit: art, religion, concept (philosophy) 3. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Berlin 1821,1824,1827,1831 1. Concept of Religion (being, immediacy…) 1. The Concept of God, 2. The knowledge of God, 3. The Cultus 2. Determinate Religion (determination) 1. Immediate Religion, 2. Rel. of beauty / eminence, 3. Rel. of effectivity 3. Consummate (revelatory, absolute) Religion (syntheses, mediation) 1. The First Element: „Immanent Trinity“ 2. The Second Element: Diremption (creation, sin) and Reconciliation (incarnation, cross) 3. The Third Element: Pneumatic-spiritual Community 1. 2. 3. Catholicism Calvinism Lutheranism Concept of Religion 1. The concept of God: God as substance, universal, content of pure thought, not the sphere of religion 2. Knowledge of God: a) Immediate knowledge: difference as beginning of religion, God is judgment, God is subject, spirit for spirit. First immediate form = universal by thinking: • “The genuine content of a religion has for its verification the witness of one’s own spirit and satisfies the needs of my spirit. My spirit knows itself, it knows its essence – that, too, is an immediate knowledge, it is the absolute verification of the eternally true, the simple and true definition of this certainty that is called faith.” • No verification by history, miracle… Hegel Contra Schleiermacher b. Feeling: …as a form of contact with God (after Kant’s rejection of theoretical reason, feeling is an appropriate way to come to the existence of God.) Hegel: But feeling does not guarantee truth…. Hegel criticized F. Schleiermacher‘s „religion of feeling“ and his assertion that “religion is the feeling of absolute dependence”. First, Hegel takes “feeling” as emotion. 1768 – 1834 • c. Representation „For human beings God is primarily in the form of representation. Representation is a consciousness of something that one has before oneself as something objective.“ “Religion is the consciousness of absolute truth in the way that it occurs for all human beings.” “Philosophy does nothing but transform our representation into concepts.” Examples: the Father begets the Sun; creation – represented as empirical action. Problem: the form of representation provokes a critique of the Enlightenment: begotten Sun, three persons in one God. d. Thought (as the way to God) • „To show coherence means in general to prove“ „Zusammenhang Zeigen heißt Beweisen überhaupt.“ • Thinking shows the – necessary - coherence of finite and infinite, and therefore proves God’s existence. • „… finite is only a limit. But inasmuch as we know something as a limit, we are already beyond it.“ „The starting point is … the finite, but spirit does not leave its subsisting.“ The spirit sublates the contradictory existence of the finite, and affirms the infinite. That is “thinking as elevation”. 3. The Cultus a) Devotion: inwardness b) Sacraments: external c) Ethical life: inwardness and external in action The Consummate Religion The Positiveness of Religion • Religion is „the consciousness of God as such“. • „God has given himself for human beings to know what he is … that it is a revealed, positive religion in the sense that it has come to humanity from without, has been given to it.“ • In a positive of religion, reason has to find the reasonable, the spiritual. The First Element: the Idea of God in and for himself – Immanent Trinity, the Father Being, universality, concept, thinking, idea, infinity “In accord with the first element, … we consider God in his eternal idea, as he is in and for himself, prior to or apart from the creation of the world” (Cf. Science of Logic § 53 “It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.”) • „… the eternal idea is expressed in terms of the holy Trinity: it is God himself, eternally triune. Spirit is this process, movement, life. This life is self-differentiation, self-determination…“ • “’God is love’” … „love is a distinguishing of two“. • God is universal,” the distinction in God is only ideal”, not real. • In his universality, God is Father: he represents God’s being, immediacy, first “status”. Philosophical Justification of the Trinity „When we say, ‚God in his eternal universality is the one who distinguishes himself, determines himself, posits an other to himself, and likewise sublates the distinction, thereby remaining present to himself, and is spirit only through this process of being brought forth‘, then the understanding enters in and counts one, two, three…“ Cf. Kant’s critique of the Trinity. „The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.“ - This concept of personhood has to be used speaking about three persons in God. Personhood is not pure individuality, no isolated Egoity → Tritheism. The Second Element: The Sun Nothing, particularity, judgment, representation, nature, finite Human perspective: “The idea must therefore be present for this subject as concrete self-consciousness, an actual subject.” = Incarnation as a self-representation of divine subjectivity. Divine perspective: “The act of differentiation is only a movement, a play of love with itself, which does not arrive at the seriousness of other-being, of separation and rupture. This other is to this extent defined as ‘Son’….” “It is in the Son, in the determination of distinction, that the advance to further distinction occurs, that distinction comes into its own true diversity.” = “The finite world is the side of distinction as opposed to the side that remains in unity; hence it divides into natural world and the world of finite spirit.” Human Nature – good, evil – both? • „…humanity is by nature good“ – „… evil“ ( J. J. Rousseau, I. Kant) • good = not cloven, not split within itself, harmonious with itself = but only immediately good = evil, because spirit is not only immediate, it is imputable, reasonable → cleavage, step out of immediacy = evil. “Original Sin” • Interpretation of Gen 3. • Paradise „we can call it a zoological garden“ (“Tiergarten”) = „status of innocence“ • Sin, fall = cleavage, status of cognition, consciousness. „For cognition or consciousness means in general a judging or dividing, a selfdistinguishing within itself… being evil resides in cognitive knowledge.“ The Serpent did not tell a lie … • „The story reports … if one knows how to distinguish good and evil, one becomes like God. … God himself says: ‚Behold, Adam has become like one of us‘ (Gen 3:22). So the words of the serpent were no deception.“ Need of Redemption • „We have first to consider the relation of the cleavage to one of the extremes, namely to God. It is an aspect of there being the need for universal reconciliation in humanity – and this means divine, absolute reconciliation… Human beings are inwardly conscious that in their innermost being they are a contradiction, and have therefore an infinite anguish concerning themselves.“ Redemption as Unity of God and Human Being • Sublation of the antitheses, the evil and contradiction. This occurs by the unity of God and man. The truth is the „sublatedness of the antithesis“. • „…the substantiality of the unity of divine and human nature comes to consciousness for humanity in such a way that a human being appears to consciousness as God, and God appears to it as a human being.“ “The necessity that the divine-human unity shall appear is due to the exclusive form by which the human being can gain certainty of the unity with God: that is the immediate sensible intuition of this unity in one human being.” “God in sensible presence can take no other shape than that of human being…” Religion: Unity with God, no moral matters • Against Kant: „… in the hearts and souls of believers is the firm belief that the issue is not a moral teaching, nor in general the thinking and willing of the subject within itself and from itself; rather what is of interest is an infinite relationship to God, to the present God, the certainty of the kingdom of God – finding satisfaction not in morality, ethics, or conscience, but rather in that than which nothing is higher, the relationship to God himself.” God in Otherness as Reconciliation • The unity of human being and God finds its definitive form at the level of sensitive certainty in Christ‘s death: • „…the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself.“ „God himself is dead“ • Johannes Rist (1641) O grosse Not! Gott selbst liegt tot. Am Kreuz ist er gestorben; hat dadurch das Himmelreich uns aus Lieb‘ erworben. O great woe! God himself lies dead. On the cross he has died; And thus he has gained for us By love, the kingdom of heaven. Man in God • “This is the explication of reconciliation; that God is reconciled with the world, or rather that God has shown himself to be reconciled with the world, that even the human is not something alien to him, but rather that this otherness, this self-distinguishing, finitude as it is expressed, is a moment in God himself…“ Trinity and Cross • „The reconciliation in Christ, in which one believes, makes no sense if God is not known as the triune God, if it is not recognized that God is, but also is as the other, as selfdistinguishing, so that this other is God himself, having implicitly the divine nature in it, and the sublation of this difference, this otherness, and the return of love, are the Spirit.“ The Third Element: The Spirit • „… the community itself is the existing Spirit, the Spirit in its existence, God existing as community.“ • „The subsistence of the community is completed by sharing in the appropriation of God‘s presence.“ - unio mystica, it starts with the host. • Cath: host as an external, sensible thing = „the present God“ • Luth: external thing is consumed in spirit and faith; no transubstantiation, but consecration in the faith of the spirit. • Calv: God only in memory, no immediate subjective presence. Confessional Preferences 1. Early Church, monkish withdrawal: Reconciliation only within the Church in a spiritual way and has the world as such over against it; 2. Middle Ages: Reciprocal dominion of the religious, spiritual realm and the worldly realm; since worldliness is not reconciled, it emerges in the church as a worldliness devoid of spirit – corruption of the church, unfreedom: absolute contradiction of the spiritual life. Confessional Preferences: Reformation, Protestantism 3. „The third way is that this contradiction is resolved in the ethical realm, or that the principle of freedom has penetrated into the worldly realm itself…” • Reconciliation has three real stages: (1) the stage of immediacy or of the heart, (2) dominance of the church, but of a church which is outside itself; (3) the stage of ethical life. Practical Consequences • „The institutions of ethical life are divine institutions – not holy in the sense that celibacy is supposed to be holy by contrast with marriage or familial love, or that voluntary poverty is supposed to be holy by contrast with active self-enrichment, or what is lawful and proper. Similarly, blind obedience is regarded as holy, whereas the ethical is an obedience in freedom, a free and rational will, an obedience of the subject toward the ethical.“ New Problems • Hegel rejects both pietism which deprives faith of dogma and theology which reduces dogma. Protestantism’s Modernity • „It is the freedom of reason that has been acquired in religion and now knows itself to be for it self in spirit. The freedom now turns against merely spiritless externality and servitude, for the latter is utterly opposed to the concepts of reconciliation and liberation.“ • This spirit of freedom which negates pure externality got into the worldly period: in Enlightenment: it negates now abstract, external forms of faith (Kant), but it tends to new forms of one-sided critique. Hegel offers the synthesis, the reconciliation. Justification by Thinking • Philosophy however guarantees content: it “knows that content is necessary, and that this necessary content is objective, having being in and for itself. This is the standpoint of philosophy, according to which the content takes refuge in the concept and obtains its justification by thinking.” Hegel‘s Philosophy of Religion • Mediation of universal and positive Religion. • History and accidentality as essentials for concept. • Rational justification of Christian dogma and confession (Trinity, Incarnation…) • Necessity of creation and incarnation • Necessity and relativity of Religion: sensitivity, representation and superiority of philosophical concept. • The problem of otherness in theory of subjectivity; absolute knowing and truth as subject-object-relation Solution: Unity of necessity, freedom and love? 4. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling‘s Critique (1775–1854) • Later philosophy (1827–1854) • differences between Hegel and Schelling concern their approaches to the absolute by reason, thinking. • Schelling: the grounding of reason by itself is philosophical self-adoration. Human reason cannot explain its own existence; therefore, it cannot encompass itself and its other within a system of philosophy. • The beginning is world, not reason. Reason is only one aspect of world. Negative and Positive Philosophy • Schelling: the identity of thought and being cannot be articulated within thought. Thought has to presuppose this identity. • ‘concept’ = already both subject and object • Negative philosophy: science of reason, negative concept of being, negative concept of the absolute, ens necessarium. • Transcendence of reason: Ecstasies, jump into being = act of positive philosophy • There is the desire of reason to contact the real God = desire of religion. Its bases is experience. • From ecstasies in being, reason returns and understands the correspondence between the concept and experience of God. Questions: • Mediation of Enlightenment / reason and Christianity / history, contingency • Mediation in the realm of reason? • Inspiring Categories, such as affirmative infinity? • Trinitarian formatting of thinking • All-overarching subjective focus • Confessional closeness to subjectivity? • Absorbed freedom, contingency in conceptual necessity • The no-necessity, historical as the necessity of man?