Lecture Eleven -- Hegel — Religion, Spirit, and History
Scope:
With Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel must be considered one of the most formative philosophers and religious thinkers of the 19th century. Unlike Schleiermacher, however, Hegel stressed our conceptual, not just experiential, knowledge of God. With a historical perspective that exerted a significant influence on 19th century thought, Hegel sought to overcome the static rationalism of the Enlightenment. He argued that history was the process by which Absolute Spirit, or God, empties itself in creation, then comes to self-consciousness in and through the historical development by which human beings achieve self-consciousness about themselves and reality. In short, our self-consciousness, at the end of this process, is God's self-consciousness. For Hegel, this process is symbolized by God taking human form in Jesus Christ and culminates in the philosophical grasp of this process in his own thought.
Outline
I. G. W. F. Hegel is generally considered to be, with Kant, one of the two greatest philosophers of the modern period.
A. He was critical of both Kant and the Romantics, of the inability of Kantian philosophy to reconcile the subjective and the objective, and of the Romantic emphasis on feeling and intuition.
B. According to Hegel, the major problem with Kant's philosophy was that its view of our relation with and knowledge of the world was too static,
1. Hegel understood reality and our knowledge of reality as something that changes, develops, over time.
2. Given that our thinking — and, thus, our philosophy — is part of the reality it seeks to apprehend, our philosophy is developing, as well.
3. Kant's view of our inability to know things as they really are is just a stage in the development of our knowledge of ourselves and the world.
4. Perhaps Hegel's main contribution was that he brought historical consciousness to philosophy.
C. Like Plato, Hegel was an idealist, which means that ultimate reality, in some sense, consists of ideas.
1. For Plato, ultimate reality is found not in the empirical, material world but in a realm of essences he called "forms." Things in the world are echoes or shadows of these forms and, thus, not as real.
2. Kant, too, is a kind of idealist to the extent that for him, nothing in the world takes shape as knowable until it is processed by the human understanding, But Hegel called Kant's idealism "subjective."
3. Hegel argues for an "absolute idealism," claiming that ultimate reality is rational and that through the use of our own rational faculties, we can participate in and know this reality.
II. Hegel gives his account of the development of our knowledge of the world, which as it turns out, is also the story of the cosmos, in his book The Phenomenology of Spirit (sometimes translated as The Phenomenology of Mind).
A. Here, Spirit, or God, begins as an undifferentiated, eternal essence, then differentiates, separates from itself, to produce cosmos, world, and humanity. The story ends with the reconciliation of Spirit with itself in. self-awareness.
1. This development proceeds by means of what Hegel calls "dialectic" or "mediation," a three-part process in which a thesis is negated by an antithesis and both are then taken up into a higher synthesis.
2. The life of Spirit and the development of human knowledge share this structure. Spirit begins in an undifferentiated, unconscious state, then is negated in the creation of the world and humanity. This process results in the synthesis whereby Spirit is reconciled to itself through the world and, particularly, through the development of human self-consciousness.
C. In other words, the process by which our knowledge of the world and ourselves develops is the same process by which Spirit comes to self-consciousness. Spirit is reconciled in us.
III. We can see in Hegel's account of Spirit a particular way of thinking about the story of the Christian God, where God is Spirit.
A. This reflects Hegel's belief that Christianity, in particular Protestant Christianity, is the "consummate religion."
1. Religion for Hegel is essentially a social phenomenon; it is the expression of the life and spirit of a particular people, perhaps the most important means by which a people not only express who they are but also reflect on that expression and, thus, come to know who they are.
2. In this way, the religion of a people tells us something very important about that people's identity. Moreover, given that human societies develop through history along with everything else — Hegel can look at the history of religion as a way of telling his story about the history of humanity and Spirit.
3. The doctrine of the Trinity reflects Hegel's tripartite structure of reality; the doctrine of the Incarnation is a way of representing Spirit's emptying out into the world; and the Resurrection of God as Holy Spirit in the Christian community is a representation of the idea that the end of the story of Spirit is the divinization of human community.
4. The spiritual freedom of Protestantism that erases the boundaries between church and world and makes priests of all believers embodies the realization that the divine is to be found not in the church but in the state.
B. A common interpretation is that Hegel, in the end, sees religion giving way to philosophy or, more plainly, that religion is a preliminary grasp of reality, a kind of knowing in pictures, that is historically superseded by the more precise conceptual grasp of reality that he identifies with philosophy.
Suggested Reading:
Hegel, Miller, and Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel and Hodgson,Lectures on the philosophy of Religion.
Smart,Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the W'est.
Questions to Consider:
1. What is Hegel's primary criticism of Kant?
2. Why does Hegel think that Protestant Christianity is the "consummate religion"?
Lecture Eleven — Transcript
Hegel — Religion, Spirit, and History
In our previous lecture, we focused on the figure that many consider to have initiated modern theology — Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher's importance, and his singular place in modern religious thought, is in large part due to the way he brought together Pietist and Enlightenment views of religion. That is, he develops a theory of religion that allows us to conceptualize it as a fundamental category of human existence based in experience and not reducible to reason or ethics. From there, Schleiermacher shows us how Christianity can be articulated on this basis and related to other religious traditions. We see something similar happening, though in a very different way, in the next thinker we will talk about: Hegel.
As an aside, I should say that as I was putting together this lecture, I was tempted to refer to Hegel like I do to all the other thinkers in these lectures when I mention them for the first time — by his first and last name, or maybe by his first initials, which are G. W. F. and stand for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. I couldn't bring myself to do it, for no one ever uses these names or even these initials — it's always just Hegel. This says something maybe about his place in modern religious thought or maybe the way that he writes — credibly systematic, even grandiose. Kierkegaard will refer to Hegel as the "writer of the system." So, people refer to Kant as Kant, and Descartes as Descartes, but it's not unusual to hear them talk about Immanuel Kant or Rene Descartes — with Hegel, it's just Hegel.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Hegel was primarily known as a philosopher, not as a theologian, and he is generally considered to be, with Kant, one of the two greatest philosophers of the modern period. For most secular-minded philosophers — and this is basically the case with Kant as well — Hegel's views on religion are not considered to be the key to his importance, and often they are ignored. Nonetheless, not only have his views on religion been extremely influential for religious thinkers, but in my view it's just hard to justify ignoring his religious thought if one wants to get a real sense of what Hegel was trying to do. Hegel developed a philosophy of religion that allowed him to construct a history of religions that, among other things, enabled him to claim the superiority of Protestant Christianity and to articulate a Christian theology. This history and this focus on history is perhaps Hegel's key contribution.
It is, at any rate, the major theme I will be emphasizing in this lecture, because Hegel is one of the major reasons the category of history comes to play a huge role in 19'"-century religious thought.
As I'll point out in the next lecture, this historical consciousness raised disturbing questions about faith — and more and more will prove a resource for those who are suspicious of religion, as we move along in the 19th century. For Hegel, though, such historical consciousness is integral to religious faith — though we also shall see that perhaps "faith" is not the best word for Hegel's understanding of religious adherence, which again is another reason we'll see him being criticized by Kierkegaard later on. The basic contrast to keep in mind here is that where Enlightenment thinkers focused on the universality and timelessness of reason as a human capacity that human beings could use well or poorly, Hegel argued that human reason develops in time, such that over time human beings get a better and better understanding of the world; of themselves, and of ultimate reality — not just because they accumulate knowledge or learn how to better use the minds that they have from the start, but because reason or mind actually changes over time. Moreover, where Enlightenment thinkers tended to idealize a natural religion, Hegel was like Schleiermacher in stressing the development of particular religious traditions. But Hegel differed from Schleiermacher in that he constructed a world-historical narrative in which all of the religious traditions are tied together in one story of development of religion — a story in which Christianity, again, is seen as the culmination of human religion. Finally, unlike both Kant and Schleiermacher, Hegel's world-historical narrative is one in which the development of reason and religion go hand in hand. Indeed, religion, for Hegel, is a kind of knowing — a point he makes clear in the following comment on the role of intellect in religion:
Love [Hegel writes] is a divine spirit but it falls short of religion. To become religion, it [that is, love] must manifest itself in an objective form. A feeling, something subjective, it must be fused with the universal, with something represented in an idea ... the need to unite subject with object, to unite feeling and feeling's demand for objects with the intellect, to unite them in something beautiful, in a god, by means of fancy, is the supreme need of the human spirit and the urge to religion.
Before we go further, let me introduce Hegel and then try to explain all of this in a bit more detail. From 1818, Hegel held the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin until his death in 1831. During this period, he was the most prominent philosopher — not only in the German-speaking world, but in all of Europe. Early in his career, he had studied Kant and was closely associated with some of the leading Romantic thinkers. These connections with Kant and Romanticism are important because one way of thinking about Hegel's philosophical creativity and originality is that he tried to find a way to think beyond what he perceived to be the primary weakness of each: on the one hand, Kant's failure to reconcile the subjective and the objective — that is, we can know the world as it appears to us, but not as it is in itself — and on the other hand, the split between feeling and cognitive knowledge in the Romantics. We can feel things, but we don't have knowledge, for instance, about God.
We have seen that Kant's solution to the epistemological impasses of the early Enlightenment, and especially to Hume's skepticism, was to stress the active role of reason and to distinguish between the world as it appears to us through this activity of reason and the world as it is in itself. So, for Kant, the cost of establishing firm foundations for our knowledge of the world was to say that we cannot know the world in itself — and this was not satisfying, as I' ve said, for many philosophers. Hegel and Schleiermacher both sought some kind of route to immediate contact with the world.
Schleiermacher, as we saw in the last lecture, posited an immediate intuition of the world — a kind of contact based not in reason, not a knowledge of the world, but in feeling. Other Romantics as well thought that intuition or feeling, especially as expressed in art and poetry, was the route to the world outside the subject. But Hegel was dissatisfied with these responses, too, and insisted that we could know the world in itself cognitively as a matter of real knowledge, not just intuition or feeling. Thus, his route to this immediate contact was philosophy. Hegel had another problem with Kant, and that was that Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers had a view of reason as something static — something that not only could not grasp the world as it really was, but also could not grasp the dynamism, the becoming, of the world and of life.
Kant's epistemology was good for capturing how we came to know objects in the world, especially in a world understood in terms of Newton's mechanical cosmos, but Hegel thought it was inadequate for capturing this sense of dynamism. So, Hegel tried to develop what we might call a "logic of life," a kind of logic that could grasp reality as something that changes and develops — that is not simply static. Not only did Hegel want to forge a philosophy that could apprehend this becoming, but he argued that since our thinking — and thus our philosophy — was part of the reality it wanted to know, philosophical apprehension is developing as well. In other words, the very way that reason grasps the world and, as we will see, grasps God develops over time — so it is not that we always have had the capacity to know the world as it really is, but that through history this capacity has developed. Hegel, therefore, thought that Kant's view of our inability to know things as they really are was just a stage in the development of our knowledge of ourselves and the world. I' ll come back to this point, but to summarize briefly, Hegel initiates a developmental or evolutionary way of thinking about reality — including human knowledge, culture, and religion — that will have an enormous impact on modem intellectual life in the 19th century.
To explain how Hegel tried to do this, we first need to think about his work through the lens of another key philosophical term: "idealism." This is a slippery term used in a number of different ways in philosophical discourse, but to get at it, let me return to the beginning, as we did in the earlier discussion of realism and nominalism — to the beginning, that is, of the Western philosophical tradition with the Greek philosopher Plato and his Theory of the Forms (or Ideas). Recall that, for Plato, ultimate reality is found not in the empirical, material world, but in the realm of essences — the realm of what he called the Ideas (or the Forms). Material reality, for Plato, is a kind of echo or shadow of these Ideas (or Forms). What is ultimately real is not this horse or that table, but the Form of the horse or the table. Idealism in this sense is simply the idea that ultimate reality resides in the Forms, which exist independently of our minds: What we described earlier as Plato's realism is the first idealist philosophy of the Western tradition.
Kant, too, is a kind of idealist to the extent that for him nothing in the world takes shape as knowable until it is processed by the human understanding — by our mind, by the ideas in our mind. Kant calls this "transcendental idealism" — we discussed this term "transcendental" briefly in the lecture on Kant. It's a form of philosophy that asks after the conditions of the possibility for our knowledge of the world. These conditions, for Kant, are ideas — that is, the intuitions of space and time, the categories of the understanding, the ideas of reason — all of these are structures of the mind that make our experience of material reality possible in the first place. But the difference between Plato and Kant, of course, is that for Plato, the Ideas (or the Forms) exist in a super-sensuous realm outside of human beings, while Kant's ideas are produced by — and are confined to — the human mind. For this reason, Hegel was dissatisfied with Kant's idealism and described it as "subjective idealism" — that is, the ideas are, again, confined to the mind.
In response, he develops a philosophical approach that he calls "Absolute Idealism." Hegel's Absolute Idealism is not confined to the finite, knowing human mind, but like Plato's is making claims about the ultimate nature or reality of things — that they are, in some sense, ideas. Like Plato, Hegel makes the striking claim that the real is rational — that we do have access to things in themselves because ultimate reality is rational, and that through our own use of our rational faculties we can participate in — and thus know — this reality. So, the mind and ultimate reality come together, and we'll talk about how this happens for Hegel. But Hegel also differs from Plato in two crucial respects. First, while for Plato the realm of the Ideas (or the Forms) was a permanent, static reality, Hegel, as we have seen, understands reality in dynamic terms. Second, Plato was a dualist: The Ideas are immaterial, and the material things of the world are only shadows of the ultimately real Forms. The philosopher, for Plato, must divorce himself from time, place, and body in an intellectual ascent to knowledge of the Forms.
Hegel, by contrast, wants to get away from the dualistic thinking that informs not only Plato, but much of the Western philosophical tradition — a dualism that forces the philosopher to choose between mind or matter as the ultimate principle of reality. For Hegel, matter is not a mere shadow, but an integral part of ultimate reality. Hegel's vision is thus comprehensive, all-embracing: He tried to take up not only the historical development of faith and reason, but of each point in history. Hegel sees each point of history as a moment in the movement of what he calls "Spirit," a movement that comes to culmination in a reconciliation of all the dualisms that we experience—particularly the dualism between mind and matter and the dualism between the world as we experience it and the world as it is.
We' re back, then, to the question of history and Hegel's account of the development of our knowledge of the world, which, as it turns out, is also the story of the cosmos and of Spirit — or what, for Hegel, is the same thing: God. So, I'm going to basically be equating God and Spirit here. Hegel tells this story in his book The Phenomenology of Spirit, which is sometimes translated as The Phenomenology of Mind, but I think Spirit is a much better translation, where he engages in an astonishing reading of the world and human history that interprets it as the life of Spirit. Spirit, in other words, is the name Hegel gives to ultimate reality taken as a whole, and it is what Jews and Christians call God. The story — to condense it down to a few lines—goes like this: Originally, Spirit, or God, is an undifferentiated, eternal essence — a Platonic Idea suspended, as it were, in a kind of stasis. But then, Spirit differentiates itself. It separates itself from itself to produce cosmos, world, and humanity. From here, then, where Spirit is separated from itself, Hegel tells a story of how Spirit becomes reunited with itself — and this is the big framework for his narrative: Spirit differentiates itself and then becomes reunited with itself. To explain how this narrative works, it is necessary to abstract from the plot to talk about its structure — or about what Hegel called his "logic." As I said, Hegel wanted to philosophically comprehend the dynamism of reality, how things become — thus his is a logic of becoming and the narrative of Spirit, which is the narrative of all that is, and of each component part including human history and human knowledge — share in this logic.
This logic has a tripartite structure. Hegel thinks in threes — and this will be very convenient when he goes to talk about the Christian trinity. The logic begins like this: There is an assertion, a proposition — X is Y — that Hegel calls a "thesis." There is, then, a negation of this thesis — X is not Y — that he calls the "antithesis." Then, finally, there is a movement — what he called a "mediation" by which the thesis and the antithesis are taken up into a higher unity, a "synthesis." Basically, for Hegel, this is a never-ending process proceeding through the power of contradiction or negation, as any given synthesis becomes a thesis, and the mediation then begins anew.
What does this mean for Hegel's story? At the metaphysical level, the biggest level, thinking about reality as a whole, we can think about it this way. We begin with the ultimate thesis: Spirit in an undifferentiated, eternal unity. To put it in biblical terms: Since Spirit is God, we can say this is God before the Creation. But then God says: "Let there be light." For Hegel, this is not God creating something distinct from himself, but rather God pouring himself out into an external form — into something that now stands over against God, so part of God that now is separate from God, and so this movement of Creation is also a movement of God's self-alienation, the Creation, out of God — of something other than God. This is antithesis — not so much a logical opposition, but a movement that creates something over against the original thesis, and that, therefore, limits it in some way. In this case, there is opposition: God is eternal, and God's Creation is temporal and finite. Thus, for Hegel, in a sense, Creation is also Fall — that is, it's the entry of negativity or contradiction into reality.
Then, we have a kind of tension or conflict within the life of God, or Spirit. Yet, this is a productive conflict — as is all opposition or contradiction in Hegel — because it allows for a kind of progress or development, a narrative, as the thesis and antithesis come together to form a new synthesis — and then begin the process again. As I said, we are here talking on the metaphysical level about the big picture as God, or Spirit, separates itself from itself — and then works toward reconciliation. That is, in the movement from undifferentiated unity to separation, and then to reconciliation, something happens~spirit changes. The story of the "phenomenology of Spirit" — for Hegel, the story for all of reality — is the story of Spirit coming to self consciousness through this process of separation, and then reconciliation. In this sense, Hegel's story of God does differ in significant ways from the story as told by most Christians: For them, God is omniscient from the start — where for Hegel, God comes to self-consciousness, thus full knowledge, in and through God's Creation.
But Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is not just the story of Spirit, or God, but of humanity as well. It is basically a narration of human history in which the development of reason, culture, religion, politics — all reflect this logic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and all contribute to the achievement of the ultimate reconciliation of Spirit. To put it simply, what is fascinating is that, for Hegel, this divine self-consciousness happens in and through human self consciousness. To put it in other words, God's self-reconciliation is ultimately worked out in and through human history — and, more specifically, it's worked out through human beings coming to self consciousness and coming to know the world as it is. As human beings engage the world, according to Hegel, they undergo the same process that Spirit is going through on a larger scale. We experience the world outside of us, and we have some knowledge of it — we come to know it and construct our lives accordingly. This is the thesis. But then, as we engage the world that stands over against us as other, we are brought up against the limits of our freedom and knowledge. This is antithesis. In and through our engagement with this other, with the world standing over against us, we come to see it and ourselves in a new, more comprehensive way. This is the synthesis. Then, the process starts again as this more comprehensive vision leads to a new positing of reality, the construction of a new form of human life — to a new thesis that is then, again, worked through in this process. For Hegel, this is the pattern of societies, cultures, ways of knowing, and religion. It is the pattern of all of these understood together as human history as a whole.
So, now we can combine the two perspectives — human history and the history of Spirit — because, for Hegel, Spirit comes to self consciousness in and through human beings coming to self consciousness as they go through this process of history on many levels and come to an ever-more-complete knowledge of themselves, the world, and ultimate reality — to the point where our full recognition of ourselves and the world is Spirit's recognition of itself. God, Spirit, realizes itself in full human self-consciousness, which is Christian reconciliation — that is, when our lives are fully informed by the Spirit of God. This is what Hegel means by "Absolute Knowledge" — that state of reconciliation in which we recognize the ultimate unity of God and Spirit on the one hand, the world and human beings on the other hand.
What does all of this mean for religion? As I've said, we can see in Hegel's account of Spirit a particular way of thinking about the story of the Christian God, where God is Spirit. This reflects Hegel's belief that Christianity, in particular Protestant Christianity, is what he calls the "consummate religion." Religion, for Hegel, is essentially a social phenomenon. It is the expression of the life and spirit of a particular people — perhaps the most important means by which a people not only express who they are, but also reflect on that expression, and so come to know who they are. "Religion," Hegel writes, "is the place wherein a people gives itself the definition of what it holds to be true, thus the representation of God constitutes the general foundation of a people." The religion of a people thus tells us something very important about that people's identity — and, moreover, since human societies are developing through history along with everything else, Hegel can look at the history of religion as the key to his story about the history of humanity and Spirit. As Hegel tells this story, it comes to a decisive — indeed, in some respects, final — point with Protestant Christianity, because he claims that this is the form of religion that is the most highly developed — it is the point at which we can see humanity and Spirit coming to full self-consciousness.
Three aspects of Christianity stand out as being particularly important in this respect. First, Jesus as God incarnate — for Hegel, the idea that God becomes incarnate in Jesus is the ultimate symbol of God revealing himself in humanity. Second, we have the Trinity. We've already seen that Hegel thinks in triads — for him, the Christian trinity — the idea that God is both one and three, a unity constituted by a dynamic interrelationship of three distinct persons; Father, Son, and Spirit. This, for Hegel, is the best religious way to understand the life and structure of Spirit. Third, God dies on the cross, and then rises again — not simply in the resurrection of Jesus, but, more importantly for Hegel, in the spirit of the Christian community, the Holy Spirit. This, essentially, is Hegel's way of saying that at the end of the history of religion, in Protestant Christianity, the divine is to be found in human community — not in
some supernatural, metaphysical realm. So, in other words, between the incarnation of God in the person and body of Jesus, and through the forming of the Christian community in and through the Holy Spirit, God is no longer confined to a realm beyond the world — but is in the world.
The Christian community is the locus — the expression and the reality — of Spirit. In Catholic Christianity, this kingdom of God on earth is the Church, but with Protestantism, according to Hegel, with its greater worldliness and its priesthood of all believers, we have the full realization that the divine is to be found not in the Church, but in the world — and, for Hegel, particularly in the state, the social group as a whole. Hegel writes: "Secular reality is justified only insofar as its absolute soul, its principle, is justified absolutely; and it receives this justification only by being recognized as the manifestation of the essence of God. It is for this reason that the state rests on religion."
This brings us to the question of the relation between religion and philosophy. Despite passages such as the one I just read, a common interpretation is that Hegel, in the end, sees religion as giving way to philosophy — or, more plainly, that religion is a kind of preliminary grasp of reality, a kind of knowing in pictures that is historically superseded by the more precise conceptual grasp of reality that Hegel seems to identify with philosophy. When we get to Absolute Knowledge then, we have no more need for religion, because philosophy has grasped everything conceptually — and so it is at a higher level than the symbolic recognition of reality that is religion. As I say, this is a common interpretation among philosophers who tend to read Hegel like they read Kant and many other philosophers or cultural critics — ignoring as inessential the religious element of the thought. In this interpretation, the views on religion of such thinkers are holdovers from an earlier age and can be more or less ignored as we focus on their more worldly concerns. Thus, as I have noted, we can follow Kant's epistemology and ethics and simply discard his postulates of God.
Or we can argue that, for Hegel, religion becomes unnecessary — or, to look forward a few lectures, we can focus on Kierkegaard as a kind of existentialist without worrying too much about his faith. We might generalize along these lines: As philosophy in the 19th century becomes more and more secularized—and this is one of the developments we will be returning to — many philosophers insist on attending to those aspects of earlier philosophers that fit secular views of the world. Certainly, it is the case that there is much in Kant, or Hegel, and even Kierkegaard that deals with secular issues, and that it is possible — and it can be instructive — to focus on these aspects without attending directly to the religious aspects of their thought. Yet, depending on how it's done, it can also distort their thought, and we need to think of at least a couple things in this connection with respect to Hegel.
First, for Hegel, philosophy — as the cognitive grasp of ultimate reality — is the culmination of a religious quest: the quest of Spirit itself to find, or to come to know, itself — and at the same time, of course, this is the human quest for self-knowledge. In one sense, then, philosophical knowledge is higher than religious faith because of its cognitive content — but in another sense, this knowledge is, itself, religious reconciliation. The second point, though, is that Hegel recognizes that philosophy is a rather elite business and does not have the power or the hold on people's imaginations and emotions to bind them together in a community, like a state — for this, religion is necessary.
As a final point, something we will return to, note that Hegel — with his narrative of history and his idea of Protestantism as the consummate religion — is essentially divinizing 19 -century Western society and state. This is the culmination of the human story. We will see this idea played out in a number of ways in the religious thought of the 19th century.
