Abstract
Wilhelm Dilthey, who was the first student to make a serious attempt to study the genesis of Hegel’s thought, claimed that “his theological work as a whole can be adequately summed up as a confrontation with (Auseinandersetzung mit) Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone.” 1 Hearing, the only scholar who has discussed all the early manuscripts more exhaustively than Dilthey, dissents. He will not allow that Kant’s influence — or for that matter anyone else’s influence, — was really preponderant in Hegel’s mind, and he insists that whatever truth there is in Dilthey’s dictum depends on giving a definite emphasis to the word Auseinandersetzung, which I suspect he wants to take in some such sense as “overcoming” or “getting away from.” 2
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Notes
Righby, Werke, IV, p. 61.
Theodor L. Haering, Hegel: Sein Wollen und Sein Werk, two volumes (Stuttgart: Scientia Verlag, Aalen, 1963).
T. M. Knox, “Hegel’s Attitude to Kant’s Ethics,” Kant-Studien, 49 (1957-58), pp. 70–81.
HtJ, p. 20.
Hegel’s view seems to have been based on a philosophy of language which he never wrote out, because he had no interest in theoretical issues as such, and which, for the same reason, he may not even have thought about in any great detail. If he had tried to develop it he would probably have found that his assumptions were too simplistic to be quite workable; but instead he adopted the KdrV, lock, stock, and barrel as his theoretical philosophy, supplementing it, where necessary, with one or two principles derived from his own prior reflections.
HtJ, p. 34. The reason so many alternatives are packed into the last sentence is most probably because Hegel wished to contrast Socrates and Greek philosophical reflection with both Moses and Jesus, representing the positive religions of Judaism and Christianity and the positive principles of authority and miracle. He simply noted down all the contrasts in his mind without trying to make a readable sentence.
Annotations quaedam theologicae ad philosophicam Kantii de religione doctrinam. This work was immediately translated into German (Philosophische Bemerkungen etc.) by C. F. Susskind, a Repetent in the Stift. Susskind added to his translation an essay of his own in which he applied the general principles and methods of Storr’s school to Fichte’s Critique of All Revelation.
But he eventually used something very like Storr’s argument against Kant’s conception of practical reason (in “The Spirit of Christianity”).
Briefe, I, p. 14.
Briefe, I, p. 22.
For Hegel’s attempt to adapt the new terminology of Fichte and Schelling to his own uses see the fragment “Die transzendente Idee von Gott,” HtJ, pp. 361f.
HtJ, p. 75.
Hegel seems always to have had a very Kantian attitude toward the truth — he might not say all he felt, but he had no truck with “white lies.”
Briefe, I, p. 29.
The proposition “Virtue deserves happiness” is the central concern of the sheet of notes on “The Transcendental Idea of God” mentioned in note 11. I suspect, therefore, that those notes were all that Hegel ever did toward the essay “on what it means to draw near to God.”
Werke, I, pp. 201f. In his essay Schelling goes through the whole table of the categories making deductions about the Absolute Ego. It is interesting therefore that Hegel in offering his only criticism chooses to query the application of the concept of substance rather than an earlier one, on the elmentary ground that the categories have no legitimate application at this noumenal level. He is worried obviously lest the new theology should at this point decay into another form of the old ontology.
Alternatively we can, if we wish to, say that there is a sense in which Kant’s doctrine as interpreted by Schelling really is the truth about “drawing near to God”; but then we must add that “drawing near to God” is not for Hegel, as it was for Kant, Fichte and the young Schelling, the ultimate purpose of human existence. It is only one phase or “moment” in the achievement of that purpose. We shall see what this alternative means in the sequel.
HtJ, p. 237.
HtJ, p. 238.
This does not mean that “evil is unreal.” Natural desires can be corrupted or perverted, and in that case the temptations they pose are evil, not natural. But evil is not “radical”; it has no place in the original constitution of “nature.”
HtJ, p. 223; Knox trans., p. 155. Nothing reveals more clearly than this comment the gulf between the moral rigorism of Kant, Fichte and the young Schelling and the ideal of natural spontaneity which Hegel inherited from Rousseau. As I pointed out in an earlier note, we can argue if we wish that Schelling really did clarify for Hegel what “drawing near to God” meant — but this “drawing near to God” was not in itself the end of man.
HtJ, p. 362.
HtJ, p. 223; Knox trans., p. 155.
Hegel does have a doctrine of the “immortality of the soul” in the Greek sense of “soul.” The life-lines through which the species perpetuates itself are immortal souls that are basic constituents of our world. But this doctrine is part of his Greek heritage (compare HtJ, p. 339; Knox trans., pp. 297f).
Hegel uses this example against Christianity in the “Spirit of Christianity.” (HtJ, p. 335; Knox trans., p. 293 — but Knox mistranslates ungeheure Verbindung because he cannot believe his own eyes.) The Greeks did not worship the hero in his torment; and Hegel was still not ready in 1800 to regard the crucified Jesus as a proper image of the divine life.
Two who think Hegel turned conservative when mature are Walter Kaufmann in his Hegel: Reinterpretation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 58-80, and G. P. Adams, The Mystical Element in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1910), p. 75. The second book seeks to explore the “mystical” or non-Kantian elements in early Hegel and is rather an antithesis to Harris’s investigation.
Paul Asveld, La Pensée religieuse du jeune Hegel (Louvain: Publ. Univ., 1953), p. 22.
Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 65.
G. Mueller, Hegel: Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen (München: Francke Verlag, 1959), p. 13.
Asveld observes: Hegel… a reçu, tant dans sa famille qu’au gymnase, un Christianisme fort large, où l’accent était mis sur le côte rationnel et moral de la religion et où le surnaturel et le mystère étaient laissés dans l’ombre.” (op. cit., p. 27).
Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), p. 6.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 7.
EtW, p. 326.
Ibid., p. 15.
W. Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City: Doubleday, Anchor Book, 1960), p. 133.
W. H. Walsh, “A Survey of Work on Hegel 1945–1952,” Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1953), p. 354.
See for example his letter to J. C. Lavater of April 28, 1775, in Arnulf Zweig’s Kant’s Philosophical Correspondence (Chicago: Univ. Press, 1967). pp. 79-82.
EtW, p. 67.
EtW, p. 165.
See pp. 72ff. preceding.
This date and certain others are taken from Gisela Schuler’s “Zur Chronologie von Hegels Jugendschriften” Hegel-Studien, 2 (1963), pp. 127ff.
Harris observes that Hegel clearly felt “that only the Greeks really understood the nature and limits of Divine Providence.” See p. … preceding.
In LPR, Vol. II, we read that “there is not the slightest trace of thought [in Judaism] that God may have done other things as well, and that he acted in an affirmative way amongst other peoples too” (p. 210). In the verse from Amos we read: “Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?”
In a letter to Schelling he wrote that he thought it would be fun “to disturb the theologians as much as possible… to make everything difficult for them, to whip them out of every nook and subterfuge.” (In Kaufmann, Hegel: Reinter-pretation, p. 43).
A. Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 114.
In the Preface to the second edition of the Religion, Kant speaks of “the renowned Dr. Storr of Tübingen who has examined my book with his accustomed sagacity and with an industry and fairness deserving the greatest thanks.”
S. S. Schmucker (ed.) An Elementary Course in Biblical Theology (translated from the work of Storr and Flatt) (Andover, Mass: Gould & Newman (1826), 1836), p. iii.
See p. 65 preceding.
Ibid.
HtJ, sec. 387: “Dem Gesetz setzte er Moralität entgegen? — Moralität ist nach Kant die Unterjochung des Einzelnen unter das Allgemeine, der Sieg des Allgemeinen über sein entgegengesetztes Einzelnes …”
Adolf E. Jensen, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, tr. by Marianna Tax Choldin & Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 77.
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Harris, H.S., Steinkraus, W.E., Munson, T.N. (1970). The Young Hegel and the Postulates of Practical Reason. In: Christensen, D.E. (eds) Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9152-4_3
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