r0b’s Reviews > Hegel: A Biography > Status Update

...much more radical, seeing his own personal religious views fairly completely in terms of his overall philosophical views about "mindedness" and "like-mindedness."

..the view I take is that Hegel's philosophically articulated views on religion (at least from Jena until the end of his life) were outgrowths of his theory of Geist and not vice versa (as so many Hegel interpreters have done and continue to do). In other words, I do not see Hegel as advancing his philosophical views on the basis of previously held religious views; Hegel was, as I understand him, much more radical...

...the usual cognates of either "spirit" or "mind." But, it should be noted, the use of "mindedness" and "like-mindedness" also submerges the possible religious connotations that Geist has in German (and which are obviously better caught by the term "spirit"). The choice of translations thus rests on an interpretive decision about how to treat the importance of religion in Hegel's system; the view I take is that...

... some of his discussion to help to clarify Hegel's conception of Geist. I do not think that this does any violence to the historically situated way in which Hegel in fact understood the concept of Geist. Indeed, I also think that the artificial terms "mindedness" and "like-mindedness" are in fact more helpful in translating the notoriously untranslatable German term "Geist" than the usual cognates of either...

Endnote: The citation on "I" and "We" occurs in Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 177, p. 1 10, PC, p. 140; PhG, p. 127. The terms themselves, "mindedness" and "like­ mindedness," are taken from Jonathan Lear, "The Disappearing 'We'," in Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, pp. 282-300. Lear uses the terms to discuss Wittgenstein's conception of mind, but I have adopted his terminology and...

...later to try to make good in his "philosophy of nature."

Jesus' death was the death of God, the way in which God became human. The divine, Hegel argued, had thereby been made manifest as rational self-conscious Geist itself. This did not imply that man was God; in Christian religion, Hegel argued, we acknowledge that we worship not ourselves, which would be absurd, but the "divine princi­ple" within ourselves, a claim he was...

...of law.
The System of Ethical Life remained unpublished and unfinished.

Philosophy speaks from the standpoint of the "absolute" - but from what point of view was the philosopher speaking when he said that? At this point, Hegel did not find even his own answers to that question very convincing; and he had to worry that his own doctrine of the "mores" of a "people" only threatened to be replace cameralism's dog­matics with some more communitarian and equally dogmatic conception of...

His essay on "The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate" thus became one more (in his eyes) failed attempt to come to terms with the complex set of issues about modern life that was troubling him.