Hegel’s early work The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu) of 1795 presents Jesus as a teacher of Kantian morality and ends abruptly with his death, anointing of his body, and burial, such that Jesus could appear to be merely a figure of the remote past. However, within a few years Hegel’s view of the death of Jesus was to change radically. Writing of his death in terms of the ‘death of God’, this individual is transformed into the universality of (...) Spirit who dwells in the community. This paper examines how this fundamental change in Hegel’s thought came about, how Hegel’s mature understanding of the death of Jesus was appropriated by Richard Wagner in his proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth, and how this ‘death of God’ became the model for the death of Brünnhilde in the Ring cycle. For both Hegel and Wagner, the death of Christ can only be understood as a self-involving enterprise, the bringing together of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Further, Wagner largely shares Hegel’s immanent understanding of God, although under other influences he can affirm the idea of a transcendent God or a transcendent world. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of the death of God in Hegel's philosophy and its implications for his political thought. It argues that Hegel's notion of the death of God involves a Christological kenotic sense of self-emptying, which extends beyond his philosophy of religion to impact his entire philosophical system, including politics, given that Hegel considers that the state consists in the march of God. The paper aims to interpret Hegel’s stance on the death of God as kenotic and its (...) integration into his system, with the purpose of addressing how this kenotic structure manifests in concrete conceptions of the state. Specifically, it examines the enigmatic figure of the Hegelian monarch as a kenotic-political figure. Finally, it concludes that Hegel's political thought consists of a political theology of kenosis, which is more concerned with the divestment of power rather than a plenipotentiary paradigm. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I relate the aesthetic mediation of reason and the identity of religion and mythology found in the Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism to Hegel’s account of the transition from the ancient Greek religion of art to the revealed religion (Christianity) in his theory ofabsolute spirit. While this transition turns on the idea that the revealed religion mediates reason more adequately in virtue of its form (i. e., representational thought), I argue that Hegel’s account of the limitations of religious representational (...) thought, when taken in conjunction with some of his ideas concerning Romantic art, suggests that he fails to demonstrate the necessity of the transition in question, thus undermining the triadic structure (i. e., art, religion, philosophy) of his theory of absolute spirit.RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, jelais un lien entre, d’une part, la médiation esthétique de la raison et l’identite de la religion et de la mythologie formulées dans le premier programme systématique de l’idéalisme allemand et, d’autre part, le récit que fait Hegel de la transition menant de la religion grecque antique de l’art à la religion révélée (la chrétienté) dans sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. Bien que cette transition repose sur l’idée que la religion révélée médiatise la raison plus adéquatement grâce à sa forme (la pensée représentationnelle), je soutiens que, si on considère parallèlement à ses idées sur l’art romantique les explications que donne Hegel au sujet des limitations de la pensée représentationnelle religieuse, ces explications laissent apercevoir qu’il échoue à démontrer la nécessité de la transition en question, ce qui a pour effet de faire s’effondrer la structure ternaire art, religion, philosophie de sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. (shrink)

Postmodernism and religion. The discussion continues to become increasingly rich and complex. In the background of much of it is Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, in which Hegel is one of his two prime paradigms. He introduced this term in 1949 in relation to Aristotle's completion of his ontology with a theology of the Unmoved Mover. When he returned to it in 1957, it was in the context of a seminar on Hegel'sScience of Logic. There he described onto-theology as allowing God (...) to enter philosophical discourse only on philosophy's terms and in the service of its project and complained, in the spirit of Pascal and Kierkegaard, that this God was religiously otiose. What he says there specifically about Hegel will best be understood after we see in what sense Hegel is a pantheist.It is possible to date quite precisely the time when Hegel abandoned theism for good. Ironically, it was in 1795 in correspondence with his two friends from seminary days at Tübingen. Schelling and Hölderlin had become Fichte enthusiasts, as we see from letters they sent to Hegel early that year. On the basis of prepublication access to Fichte's 1794Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling wrote on January 5,Philosophy is not yet at an end. Kant has provided the results. The premises are still missing. And who can understand the results without the premises? … Kant has swepteverythingaway, but how is the crowd to notice? One must smash it to pieces before their very eyes, so they grasp it in their hands. The great Kantians now everywhere to be seen have got stuck on the letter … [;] the old superstition of so-called natural religion as well as of positive religion has in the minds of most already once more been combined with the Kantian letter. It is fun to see how quickly they get to the moral proof. Before you can turn around thedeus ex machinasprings forth, the personal individual Being who sits in Heaven above!Fichtewill raise philosophy to a height at which even most of the hitherto Kantians will become giddy …. Now I am working on an ethicá laSpinoza. (shrink)

Hegel's philosophy of religion is characterized by what seems to be a deep tension. On the one hand, Hegel claims to be a Christian thinker, viewing religion, and in particular Christianity, as a manifestation of the absolute. On the other hand, however, he seems to view modernity as largely secular, devoid of authoritative claims to transcendence. Modernity is secular in the political sense of requiring the state to be neutral when it comes to matters of religion. However, it is also (...) secular in the sense of there being no recourse to authoritative representations of a transcendent God. Drawing on Charles Taylor's view of secularization, the article focuses on the second strand of his religious thinking, exploring how Hegel can be thought of as a theorist of secularization. It is claimed that his dialectic of religious development describes a process of secularization. Ultimately, Hegel's system offers a view of the absolute as immanent, suggesting that an adequate account of religion will necessarily have to accept secularization as the end-point of spirit's development. This is how the tension between religion and secularization can be resolved. (shrink)

This essay seeks to develop and illustrate an approach to comparison based on "ad hoc" frames. A frame is defined by a question, to which dif- ferent thinkers can be seen as offering complementary and/or competing responses. Pursuing a middle ground between universalist conceptions of comparison and particularist rejections of comparison, this approach brings various positions into dialogue in a manner that is not inherently totalizing. The article draws extensively on Hegel's philosophy of religion to articulate this approach to comparison (...) and its presuppositions. The sec- ond section of the essay seeks to illustrate the value of this approach by using the question of how traditional practices are inherited to frame a comparison of Hegel on habit and the Confucian thinker Xunzi on ritual. This comparison functions principally to indicate the process of comparison and suggest the value of pursuing this comparison in greater depth. (shrink)