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Frühe Schriften
- GenresPhilosophy
640 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 1986
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About the author
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2,188 books2,542 followersGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 22, 2024
What I have read here, and what I am reviewing, is Hegel's long essay Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, commonly translated as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. This book includes other useful documents that are helpful for the study of Hegel, and especially as preparatory study for his Phenomenology, such as early sketches of his conceptions of idealism and system philosophy. Students of Hegel's political philosophy will find his Die Verfassung Deutschlands significant. Note that this volume does not include his Differenzschrift, which is found in Werke volume 2.
The Spirit of Christianity is an analysis of the evolution of consciousness over the span of the Old and New Testaments, as Hegel reconstructs it from his reading of the Bible, periodically supplemented by observations brought in from classical sources such as Josephus. He seems to oscillate a bit with respect to whether or not he believes these sources accurately characterize actual history, and at one point suggests that whether they do or not, they are significant for chronicling the received history upon which contemporary societies base their self-understanding.
It goes without saying that few today would seek to discover a "spirit of Judaism" or "of Christianity" on any basis, much less on a source as problematic as the Bible. In some ways, that's a loss, as analyses of cultures and broad forms of life can be philosophically rich. But they are also obviously problematic in ways that no modern reader can ignore. Like me, they will most likely have to situate themselves within the spirit of Hegel's age to engage with this text on its own terms.
Many of Hegel's interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, and of the "progression" leading from the former to the latter, are chestnuts of Latin Christendom's self-understanding - especially the account of the Jews as a people of laws and covenants, and the Christians as moving beyond such a reductive mode to attempt a universal conception of our relationship to one another and to the divine. Some of Hegel's analyses are reductive, and some of them are uncomfortably close to antisemitic cliches, though I would myself not characterize either the work or Hegel as antisemitic. I would understand if some did, but I think it is important to recognize, for example, that he sees the legalistic spiritual vocabulary of the Old Testament as a form of the more general tendency to organize moral principles in terms of laws that derive their ultimate authority from a source outside of nature, and that is the object of his critique. To a large degree, the real target of his critique is Kant's moral philosophy and its structure of authority and obligation.
What was most novel and interesting in the book is Hegel's attempt to recover and reconstruct an account of the autonomous internal dynamics by which various historical periods constituted entire varieties of central social, theological, ontological, and epistemic categories. This set of internal relations he seeks to excavate has been called "the logic of experience." But he does not explicitly thematize his own method, unfortunately, and as usual, it is up to the reader what exactly he seems to be doing, and to evaluate it. It is not entirely clear to me that experience necessarily implies the kind of worked-out internal architectonic structure and consistency that Hegel's account would seem to presuppose.
Much of the character of his argument can be seen in this striking quotation:
"The relationship between the boundless and the finite is, freely, a holy secret, because this relationship is itself life. The reflection which divides life can differentiate it into a boundless and a bounded, and only the delimitation, the finite considered for itself, yields the concept of man as the contrary term to the divine. Outside of reflection, it does not in truth occur."
[Der Zusammenhang des Unendlichen und des Endlichen ist freilich ein heiliges Geheimnis, weil dieser Zusammenhang das Leben selbst ist; die Reflexion, die das Leben trennt, kann es in Unendliches und Endliches unterscheiden, und nur die Beschränkung, das Endliche für sich betrachtet gibt den Begriff des Menschen als dem Göttlichen entgegengesetzt; außerhalb der Reflexion, in der Wahrheit findet sie nicht statt.]
The idea here is that the evolution of rational reflection has led to forms of objectification and estrangement, such that the impersonal powers of reason that we rely on to command nature take on a life of their own and become a numinous moral and spiritual authority. In Hegel's reading, Jesus sought to free the spiritual community from the oppressive and inhuman character of this ultimate authority by returning human relations to the natural condition of interacting directly out of love.
In his study of Hegel, Walter Kaufmann sees this essay as essentially reading Goethe (Iphigenia) and Schiller (Letters) into the career of Jesus, and I think there is some truth to it. But Kaufmann fails completely to acknowledge the novelty of Hegel's excavation of the logic of experience, which astonishes me - I can hardly see how that would be possible, but there it is.
Some of Hegel's specific arguments were extremely interesting. Two highlights for me were his account of why monotheism is so fundamental to Jewish moral and theological law. Having recently read through a bit of the Deuteronomistic histories in a reading group, this occurs as a fairly urgent question - why Israel was forsaken by God in Kings on account of the tolerance of certain Jewish kings for polytheism, without much consideration for any other aspect of their reigns. And the most interesting part of the book for me was his analysis of the law, and the way that a rigid conception of the law makes the ultimate source of the law's authority occur to consciousness as an overpowering force that is hostile to life. Readers of Kafka and Dostoevsky will find this section enormously interesting.
There are other long sections that I found to be of little value, which were repetitive, or obscure, or unconvincing, or all three. He has a tendency to get lost in the calculus of his own abstractions such that he loses contact with the actual phenomenon he's trying to explicate.
In contrast with Hegel's similar analyses in the Phenomenology, his argument here is rather more straightforward and limited in scope. That makes this text a useful adjunct to the Phenomenology, as you can begin to grok his general approach.
The Spirit of Christianity is an analysis of the evolution of consciousness over the span of the Old and New Testaments, as Hegel reconstructs it from his reading of the Bible, periodically supplemented by observations brought in from classical sources such as Josephus. He seems to oscillate a bit with respect to whether or not he believes these sources accurately characterize actual history, and at one point suggests that whether they do or not, they are significant for chronicling the received history upon which contemporary societies base their self-understanding.
It goes without saying that few today would seek to discover a "spirit of Judaism" or "of Christianity" on any basis, much less on a source as problematic as the Bible. In some ways, that's a loss, as analyses of cultures and broad forms of life can be philosophically rich. But they are also obviously problematic in ways that no modern reader can ignore. Like me, they will most likely have to situate themselves within the spirit of Hegel's age to engage with this text on its own terms.
Many of Hegel's interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, and of the "progression" leading from the former to the latter, are chestnuts of Latin Christendom's self-understanding - especially the account of the Jews as a people of laws and covenants, and the Christians as moving beyond such a reductive mode to attempt a universal conception of our relationship to one another and to the divine. Some of Hegel's analyses are reductive, and some of them are uncomfortably close to antisemitic cliches, though I would myself not characterize either the work or Hegel as antisemitic. I would understand if some did, but I think it is important to recognize, for example, that he sees the legalistic spiritual vocabulary of the Old Testament as a form of the more general tendency to organize moral principles in terms of laws that derive their ultimate authority from a source outside of nature, and that is the object of his critique. To a large degree, the real target of his critique is Kant's moral philosophy and its structure of authority and obligation.
What was most novel and interesting in the book is Hegel's attempt to recover and reconstruct an account of the autonomous internal dynamics by which various historical periods constituted entire varieties of central social, theological, ontological, and epistemic categories. This set of internal relations he seeks to excavate has been called "the logic of experience." But he does not explicitly thematize his own method, unfortunately, and as usual, it is up to the reader what exactly he seems to be doing, and to evaluate it. It is not entirely clear to me that experience necessarily implies the kind of worked-out internal architectonic structure and consistency that Hegel's account would seem to presuppose.
Much of the character of his argument can be seen in this striking quotation:
"The relationship between the boundless and the finite is, freely, a holy secret, because this relationship is itself life. The reflection which divides life can differentiate it into a boundless and a bounded, and only the delimitation, the finite considered for itself, yields the concept of man as the contrary term to the divine. Outside of reflection, it does not in truth occur."
[Der Zusammenhang des Unendlichen und des Endlichen ist freilich ein heiliges Geheimnis, weil dieser Zusammenhang das Leben selbst ist; die Reflexion, die das Leben trennt, kann es in Unendliches und Endliches unterscheiden, und nur die Beschränkung, das Endliche für sich betrachtet gibt den Begriff des Menschen als dem Göttlichen entgegengesetzt; außerhalb der Reflexion, in der Wahrheit findet sie nicht statt.]
The idea here is that the evolution of rational reflection has led to forms of objectification and estrangement, such that the impersonal powers of reason that we rely on to command nature take on a life of their own and become a numinous moral and spiritual authority. In Hegel's reading, Jesus sought to free the spiritual community from the oppressive and inhuman character of this ultimate authority by returning human relations to the natural condition of interacting directly out of love.
In his study of Hegel, Walter Kaufmann sees this essay as essentially reading Goethe (Iphigenia) and Schiller (Letters) into the career of Jesus, and I think there is some truth to it. But Kaufmann fails completely to acknowledge the novelty of Hegel's excavation of the logic of experience, which astonishes me - I can hardly see how that would be possible, but there it is.
Some of Hegel's specific arguments were extremely interesting. Two highlights for me were his account of why monotheism is so fundamental to Jewish moral and theological law. Having recently read through a bit of the Deuteronomistic histories in a reading group, this occurs as a fairly urgent question - why Israel was forsaken by God in Kings on account of the tolerance of certain Jewish kings for polytheism, without much consideration for any other aspect of their reigns. And the most interesting part of the book for me was his analysis of the law, and the way that a rigid conception of the law makes the ultimate source of the law's authority occur to consciousness as an overpowering force that is hostile to life. Readers of Kafka and Dostoevsky will find this section enormously interesting.
There are other long sections that I found to be of little value, which were repetitive, or obscure, or unconvincing, or all three. He has a tendency to get lost in the calculus of his own abstractions such that he loses contact with the actual phenomenon he's trying to explicate.
In contrast with Hegel's similar analyses in the Phenomenology, his argument here is rather more straightforward and limited in scope. That makes this text a useful adjunct to the Phenomenology, as you can begin to grok his general approach.
October 13, 2017
A difficult but incredibly rich and enriching read. Hegel was not one for making the reading of his work easy and even less so for his early unpublished writings, but there is still so much value in his writings on Christianity and Jesus, there is much he has to write on regarding the law and its legitimacy, as well as the formulations of his dialectic
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews