The Theological Foundations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
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One of the greatest philosophical treasures I have recently found is an introduction to Hegel’s early theological writings contained in a collection of essays titled, “On Christianity: Early Theological Writings,” (1907) by Friedrich Hegel, trans. by T. M. Knox with an Introduction by Richard Kroner, (pdf.).
After being dismissed from the university at Kiel by
the German Nazis in 1934, the Neo-Hegelian philosopher, Richard Kroner, escaped
to America to become professor of philosophy at Manhattan’s Union Theological
Seminary. Kroner’s introduction to Hegel’s early theological writings (original
text pages 1-66) is a condensed overview of Hegel’s Christian theology.
Kroner narrates the evolution of Hegel’s thoughts on religion from about 1788
to 1801, which ultimately appears in his most famous written work “The
Phenomenology of Spirit,” in 1807. Kroner comments on Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit (pdf.)
in his introduction to build a larger picture of Hegel’s goal, “to
intellectualize Romanticism and to spiritualize Enlightenment (Hegel’s Early
Theological Writings, here on as HET, original pagination 21).”
Dr. Kroner recounts how Hegel was extremely impressed by the philosophical movements of his time including Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The German Romantic poet-philosophers Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling were school roommates with Hegel. Philosophers Kant, Rousseau, and the famous poet Goethe (who was a close friend of Schelling) are also found at the core of Hegel’s fully matured philosophical system.
In these early--and sometimes conceptually contradictory--theological essays Hegel works out the dialectical-philosophical language he needed to write the Phenomenology of Spirit. This appearance (phenomenology) of Geist (Spirit or Mind) is a history of the evolutionary development of human consciousness into higher self-consciousness and truth: that is to say, the process of the Logos becoming incarnate.
Yet even his love for these philosopher-poets did not prevent Hegel from critiquing Romanticism and the Enlightenment and even rejecting some parts, or whole worldviews. Hegel rejected Schelling’s conception of God-substance as the Absolute (Being as an undivided whole) with the one-liner response, “…in the Absolute, all cows are black….” Instead, Hegel formulated the Absolute, the whole of a unified reality, as God-Subject, i.e., immaterial Mind, or Spirit.
Knox does not mention in
his introduction one other similar case involving the theologian--and has
always annoyed me--when Hegel rejected Kantian philosopher-theologian
Schleiermacher and his doctrine of the connection humans have with the infinite
as a “feeling of absolute dependence on the infinite.” Hegel gave the
brutal response, "If religion
grounds itself in a person only on the basis of feeling, then . . . a dog would
be the best Christian, for it carries this feeling more intensely within itself
and lives principally satisfied by a bone." The same sentiment toward theologies
of experience exists to this day.
Of course Hegel’s
counter-argument is not fair to neither Schelling, nor Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher would never claim religious experience is “only on the basis of
feeling.” Schleiermacher’s use of the term “feeling” does not mean mere
affection, or “sensation,” which is “...the lowest stage in the development of
the human spirit,” but rather “feeling, as immediate self-consciousness, is the
last and highest stage in the same development.” Feeling is the synthesis of
thought and will; it is the unity of our being. (see,
Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative,”Robert Munro, Pub. Paisley, Alexander
Grardner, 1903, p.200)
Schelling views the entire
history of philosophy as a struggle between positive philosophy (historical
philosophy) and negative philosophy (for Schelling ultimately meaning religious
philosophy). Schelling writes, “At the
end of negative philosophy I have only possible [my emphasis] and not
actual religion…It is with the transition to positive philosophy that we first
enter the sphere of religion (Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of
Philosophy: Modern Philosophy, Fichte to Hegel, Vol. 7, Part I, Doubleday,
1965, page 170).”
Schelling believed there should be an emphasis on a philosophy of nature to compensate for the tendency of thought systems to bypass actual existential being since purely idealist philosophies cannot ever logically deduce the world’s existence, or positive being from negative essences, or concepts. Schelling’s emphasis on philosophy of existence, of actuality continued with Left Hegelians philosophers such as Feuerbach (All theology is anthropology) and Marx (dialectical historical positivism). In 1831 Shelling filled Hegel’s chair of philosophy in Berlin and attempted in his lectures to correct what he believed was Hegel’s overemphasis on the negative philosophy of abstract possibility.
The Dialectical Development of Hegel’s Early Theology
“To eliminate the Kantian element in Hegel's philosophy is like eliminating the Platonic element in Aristotle.”—Professor Knox.
Hegel disagreed with Kant in other areas of epistemology and ethics, but he still remained Kantian at heart through his entire life. The pre-Socratic philosopher of change, Heraclitus, and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason inspired Hegel’s dialectical method presented in the Phenomenology (citing HET,p. 4). However, in that same work (Paragraphs 596-671, or pp. 424-72) Hegel harshly and enthusiastically criticized Kant’s ethical system of Duty (deontological ethics) as only a particular stage of developing human self-consciousness. The reason for Hegel’s rejection of Kantian ethics of duty is that all positive historical aspects of religion is purged leaving behind a abstract moralistic idealism impossible to achieve in existence, “…consciousness has realized that its truth is a pretended truth (Phenomenology, para. 631).
Thesis: The "Life of Jesus" as a Kantian Teacher of Ethics
Hegel drew his conclusions
about Kantian ethics partly by performing a thought experiment in an essay on
the “Life of Jesus” that presents Jesus as a teacher, or “the schema of
morality” within the categories of Kantian religious moral rationalism. This
essay was not meant for publication, and is fragmentary; however, Hegel’s
criticism is more clearly expressed in his later mature writings (HET, p. V).
Hegel eventually rejected the hypothetical Kantian Christ as non-historical
(negative) that eventually devolves into the same pharisaic legalism that Jesus
originally tried to liberate his followers. Kant’s pure moral rationalism is
negative and rejects all historical (positive) elements as merely accidental,
or non-essential to religion (Ibid., p. 5).
Hegel was dissatisfied with Christianity in his era
that reduced itself to a mass collection of statues, dogmatic doctrines, and
superfluous creeds. While still heavily influence by Kantian moral rationalism
at the age of twenty-five, Hegel wrote, “In The Positivity of the Christian
Religion” (The first two parts written in 1795-96, and part III in about
1800) in which he traces the internal problems of Christian orthodoxy to the
historical context it emerged. A strict monastic Judaism, and a brutal Roman
Empire were the forces that shaped Christianity echoing through the ages:
“While Jesus aimed at a purely moral religion and fought against superstition and positivity, he could not help generating a church by positive means. He was bound to connect respect for the holiness of moral law with respect for the holiness of his own person. Thus the seed of ecclesiastical authority and of the positivity of all religious forms and institutions was planted. This is the tragic origin of the Christian church (HET,p. 4).”
Antithesis: Hellenistic Humanism with Kantian Rational Ethics
Hegel idealistically viewed Greek folk religion as one of freedom, “imagination and enthusiasm” as opposed to a inhuman clerical bureaucracy of rules that is “the religion of Enlightenment dominated by reason (HET,p. 3).” Hegel believed religion should be about this world and centered about the Greek notion of beauty, freedom, wisdom, and artistic imagination. Hegel still held onto to Kant’s rational ethics of positive moral action (actualization).
Then suddenly in 1796 after moving from Bern to
Frankfort, Germany, Hegel became more influenced by the Romantic philosophers
such as Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, and Holderlin and then published his
views in the essay, “The Spirit of Christianity,” reversing his former
position by reaffirming the need for a historical (positive) Christianity. Now
as a mystic Hegel created a new synthesis of Greek humanism, and Kantian moral
philosophy which itself has a deep kinship to Judaism:
“The soul of Greek religion is beauty; the reason of Kantian philosophy is morality. Hegel concluded that ultimate truth was moral beauty, and this truth he discovered in the Gospel. The moral principle of the Gospel is charity, or love, and love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty which combines the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason. This is the synthesis achieved in The Spirit of Christianity (HET,p. 25).”
But once again truth is discovered to only be
pretended truth. These three worldviews of Hellenism, Kantianism, and Judaism
had an other-worldliness. Judaism and Kantianism were “monarchical theism”
while Hellenism was polytheistic, pantheistic, combined with Stoicism. Hegel
believed, “…Jesus teaches a pantheism of love which reconciles Greek pantheism
with Judaic and Kantian theism (HET, p. 10).”
The internal contradiction of Hellenism and Kantianism are synthesized by Hegel with the Gospel of Jesus to create a ”Pantheism of Love,” (ibid., p. 10). The unifying Gospel of love overtakes atomizing alienated reflection. Christ represents now a non-rational ethics, but a more powerful unsystematic non-conceptual “ethics of Love.” Hegel believed that this newly synthesized pantheism of love reconciles the disunity of “one-sided rationalism, one-sided emotionalism, or one-sided empiricism.” Even in Hegel’s philosophical development we see the same pattern repeatedly emerge beginning with an original organic unity (thesis), then disunity (antithesis) that moves on to temporary reconciliation (synthesis).
Antithesis: The Pantheism of the Logos
Unfortunately, love is not enough…to bridge the alienating chasm between life (existence) and thought (essence). The spirit of Christianity has historically continually fallen into the trap of objectifying itself into a dogmatic faith of doctrines and creeds instead of a living community of universal spiritual love. After about 1796 Hegel undergoes yet another paradigm shift that provides a more scientific (methodologically systematic) approach to philosophy that recognizes the dialectical patterns created by the interplay of logical oppositions in thought and actual history. With this new methodology Hegel still retains pre-Socratic Hellenistic influences in the form of Heraclitean cosmology where all things material and immaterial emerge out of conflict and change in accordance to a single Logos, or Reason. The Romantics were seemingly pushed out of the system, but they still heavily influenced Hegel’s thinking within this new synthesis that attempted to unify Romantic spirit with logical analysis.
“…ultimate unification was to be brought about by a rational rather than a Romantic method. While the Romanticists were content with denying ultimate separation, indulging in pictorial language and paradoxes to give force to their negation….The original unity of all things is for him not the object of a mystical or poetical intuition but a truth discovered by logic (HET, p. 15).”
Yet, this ultimate conceptual unification still
contains within it different stages of human mind, or consciousness (Enlightenment,
Romanticism, Ethical, Religious) presented in Hegel’s later 1807 Magnum
opus, “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” These same familiar internally
conflicting frame of minds, or shapes of consciousness are reconstructed by
phenomenological description as “self-certain Spirit (para. 166),”
“unhappy consciousness (para. 197),” “self-alienated Spirit (para.
487),” and “the beautiful soul (para. 632).” These multiple states
of consciousness can be found at anytime among persons in many cultures today,
and maybe even especially today. According to Hegel the Logos (Reason) can
guide consciousness down the road of historical experience to a conceptual
unification of Existence and Essence, the Whole and the Parts, of the Infinite
and the Finite.
Reading and rereading Dr. Richard Kroner’s introduction with these theological texts not only provide endless insights into Hegel’s own thought, but also give insight into other philosophers (Marx and Kierkegaard) who imitated and critiqued Hegelian Absolute Idealism.
