Kantian

The Golgotha of the Absolute

In these days of secularism, an atheist is simply a person who no longer believes in the existence of the God. One may be an atheist and still practice the religion of his parents out of habit. However, the word ‘atheist’ connotes a faint stigma that dates back to an older age- the medieval- where a radical infidel who was either brave or foolish enough to oppose the canons of the establishment of the time, the Church, was speedily condemned with charges of heresy and subsequently punished with excommunication or worse, execution. Once the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment emerged in the 17th and the 18th century, as well as the challenge of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church gradually began to slacken its iron grip on the publishing press. In the 19th century, the orthodoxy remained very much in power and strongly influenced the works of scholars with the expectation that whatever was written should be readily compatible with the prevailing dogmas. This was very much the case for the philosopher Hegel. As far as Hegel was concerned, Zeus could fill in for YHVH in his writings, but due to the culture of the times Hegel had the German guardians of the Christian orthodoxy breathing heavily down his neck, so this ought be taken in account whenever encountering Christian overtones in his work.

In Hegel's systematic philosophy, the Absolute originally manifests itself in the form of immediacy, or objects of sense. This manifestation is apprehended as ‘beauty,’ which is the “sensuous semblance [Scheinen] of the Idea.” The aesthetic consciousness apperceives the Absolute through the veil of senses as the Ideal. However, aesthetic intuition is not philosophy. Only thought itself can adequately apprehend the Absolute as Spirit, Reason, or self-thinking Thought. Instead of making the jump from art to philosophy, Hegel introduces religion as an intermediate mode of apprehending the Absolute. Religion presents the self-manifestation of the Absolute in the form of Vorstellung, or ‘pictorial representation.’ Where the aesthetic consciousness employs the veil of senses in its apprehension of the Absolute, the religious consciousness 'thinks' the Absolute, though not in the pure conceptual manner of philosophy. Vorstellung is a signpost, a type of imagery that represents the concept of the Absolute, what Frederick Copleston calls a “marriage between imagination and thought.” For example, when the religious consciousness apprehends the logical Idea, or Logos, as being objectified in nature as a ‘pictorial representation,’ it conceives of God's creation of the universe.

As for the divine entity of monotheism, God, Hegel equates God with Being, which is already demonstrated in logic and abstract metaphysics of his systematic philosophy. However, Hegel considers the traditional arguments of God's existence as completely out of date from a philosophical point of view, as well as from a religious and irreligious point of views. The only proof of God's existence is the Hegelian system itself. This leads to the inference that Hegel's philosophy of religion is merely a matter of explaining the religious state of mind and how it apprehends the concept of the Absolute, rather than a philosophical attempt at Christian apologetics.

Hegel noted that philosophy, after Descartes, began to be able to stand on its own legs without the need to posit the existence of God and gave birth to modern philosophy. In Medieval philosophy, the first premise had to be God, but once Descartes came along, philosophy became subjectively grounded, or ich denke. It is true that for both Descartes and Hegel the concept of God could be assimilated with their systems, but that led to a redundancy, nothing more than window dressing to appease those in power. It took the prodigious strength of the philosophical genius of Descartes to sound the death-knell of philosophy’s time as a courtesan to theology, that philosophies no longer needed the God hypothesis.

After James Stirling published his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0697000583/qid=1039264766/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-9674264-2883308?v=glance&s=books&n=507846" target="_blank">The Secret of Hegel</a> in 1865, Hegel’s philosophy became to be seen as an ally for Christianity, or at least it became fashionable to reconcile his cavernous and monolithic philosophy with the doctrines of Christianity. Stirling even went far enough to declare that Hegel was “the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity.” It is true that Hegel did presents philosophical proofs for the Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the Fall, and the Incarnation. Nevertheless, in the end, as ‘pure thought,’ Hegel resolved the doctrines in a far different light than those of the Church, which authorized special revelation instead of speculative philosophy. Despite the apparent reconciliation between Christian orthodoxy and Hegel's philosophy of religion, and the number of several references to God and Christianity in the mature works, John McTaggart did not think Hegelianism was an ally of Christianity. He declared that Hegel's philosophy was “an enemy in disguise - the least evident but the most dangerous. The doctrines which have been protected from external refutation are found to be transforming themselves till they are on the point of melting away...” The radical Protestant Kierkegaard guessed at Hegel’s true position as well, and wrote books that railed against the totalizing specter of Hegelian rationalism.

Robert Solomon proposes that Hegel was secretly an atheist, that the references to Christianity in his writings were nothing more than “nominal...an elaborate subterfuge to protect his professional ambitions,” and lists several evidences in support of that claim. Hegel was all too aware that Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated, on the grounds of heresy, and his masterpiece, Ethics was condemned in Germany. Fichte's radicalization of Kantian philosophy was suspected of atheism and he was subsequently dismissed from his university post. Frederick Wilhelm II reprimanded even the devout Immanuel Kant. During the years of 1793 to 1799, Hegel wrote a bunch of papers on Christianity with Nietzschean overtones, full of poisonous bile and vituperative denunciations, but in 1800 he abruptly shifted to a friendlier position. Solomon also points out that that year of the ‘great conversion’ to Christianity is also the same year Hegel began his professional career, and began writing his Magnus opus, the Phenomenology of Spirit. In effect, there is no difference between the ‘anti-theological’ phase of the younger Hegel, and the far more prudential, supposedly ‘mature’ Hegel.

“Hegelian atheism has a very special character. Hegel is not atheistic in the usual sense of the word, for he does not reject the Christian notion of God, and does not even deny its reality. And so, one often finds theological formulas in Hegel's philosophy. But in the deepest sense, this philosophy is nevertheless atheistic and non-religious.” At the end of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198245971/qid=1039264869/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-9674264-2883308" target="_blank">Phenomenology of Spirit,</a> Hegel employs an allegorical phrase, the “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.” Hegel, not Nietzsche, is the first philosopher to use the phrase "the death of God," and this aptly characterizes Hegel's concept of the Absolute that lies beyond the intermediate philosophy of religion as the exposition of the encounter of the religious consciousness with the vorstellung. The vorstellungen or biblical stories were merely a stopgap, a midway station of the express train to the philosophical goal of pure concept of the Absolute. After a long and exhaustive study, McTaggart concludes that “Hegel supports Christianity against all attacks but his own, and thus reveals himself as its most deadly antagonist.”In fact, the apparent theological overtones within the philosophy of the absolute is one of the most devious trojan horse ever devised.

Metaphysics in Hegelianism paved the way for Feuerbach's naked atheism, which in turn sowed the seeds for later philosophers such as Nietzsche for their own brand of sacrilegious writings. When we are presented with the finite and infinite dialectic, then we have no other choice but to say that man is God in its ‘otherness’ or that man is essentially divine in its own right. The finite is not limited to the contingent reality, which is ‘extrinsically infinitized,’ because the finite is already ‘intrinsically infinite’ itself. This is one loose strain Feuerbach extracts for his underrated perception of theology as anthropology, that the worship of the Divine is nothing other than the worship of man himself. The only reason why man conceptualizes the divine is because he is already alienated from the world, posits an ‘hinterwelt,’ and these impulses encourage a ‘false consciousness’ of something divine, which is nothing more than illusory. For Hegel, man regains independence from God by attributing him elements of transcendental divinity. Now that man is himself divine, he is at large to create his own morality, a morality far superior to the morality of the slaves, e.g., Christianity. Hegel was one of the first prominent philosophers to advance the idea that God was dependent upon the world at least as much as the world was dependent upon God. He said that without the world God is not God. In some way, God needed his creation. This was the first step in saying that, since God was not sufficient in Himself, he was then unnecessary, spurious, and ultimately romantic.

According to Walter Kaufmann, Heinrich Heine illustrates a personal side of Hegel: “One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of about twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: ‘the stars, hum! hum! The stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.’ For God’s sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: ‘So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother? ‘ Saying that he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer who had approached him to invite him to play whist.”

~transcendentalist~

[ December 07, 2002: Message edited by: Kantian ]</p>

lpetrich

Seems to me that Hegel's views are more pantheist than atheist in the strict sense -- like Spinoza's.

abe smith

Hegel is dead.