What do you think?
Rate this book
The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History
A bold and beautifully written exploration of the "afterlife" of God, showing how apparently secular habits of mind in fact retain the structure of religious thought.
Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion.
The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant's philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a "Church invisible" working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant's ideas about personal immortality, this idea of "historical immortality" took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament.
A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity's theistic inheritance.
Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion.
The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant's philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a "Church invisible" working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant's ideas about personal immortality, this idea of "historical immortality" took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament.
A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity's theistic inheritance.
- GenresPhilosophyReligion
416 pages, Hardcover
Published June 30, 2022
7 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
About the author
Michael E. Rosen
10 books6 followersMichael E. Rosen is a British political philosopher who is active in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental European intellectual thought. He is currently a professor at Harvard University.
Rosen holds a B.A. in philosophy, awarded in 1974, and a D.Phil. awarded in 1980, both from Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to joining Lincoln College, Oxford, he served as a lecturer in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1981, an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1981 to 1982, a special fellow in politics at Merton College, Oxford, from 1982 to 1985, and a lecturer in philosophy at University College London from 1986 to 1990.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Rosen holds a B.A. in philosophy, awarded in 1974, and a D.Phil. awarded in 1980, both from Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to joining Lincoln College, Oxford, he served as a lecturer in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1981, an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1981 to 1982, a special fellow in politics at Merton College, Oxford, from 1982 to 1985, and a lecturer in philosophy at University College London from 1986 to 1990.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.