Mutual Need and Frustration: Hegel’s Conception of Religion and Philosophy in the Modern Era

MUTUAL NEED AND FRUSTRATION: HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE MODERN ERA HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY is often looked upon as an important, if not always welcome, catalyst of philosophy's modern development. Depending upon one's own philosophical predilections, Hegel's philosophy retarded or advanced philosophical reflection but always in the course of being rejected itself.1 For some the pretentious compass and rigidity of an encyclopedic system present the greatest difficulties. For others the arguments for the integrity of a spirituality over nature, history, and/or society are particularly unconvincing, resembling thinly-veiled apologetics if they deserve to be called arguments at all. Whatever their particular misgivings with Hegel's philosophy , however, a majority of modern thinkers uniformly repudiate one thesis of Hegel's philosophy in particular, viz., the thesis that religious faith and the metaphysics of a philosophical system are mutually accountable. According to this thesis, philosophy and religion in their own respective ways need and explain one another. Rejecting this view, positivists place religious faith outside the domain of meaningful discourse while some language analysts, eschewing positivist systems, locate 1 Thus in Habermas's attempt to chart the development of the modern positivist mentality, rejection of Hegel's philosophy forms the starting point of that movement . See J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), Chapter One. For a similar claim see R. Bubner, Modern German Philosophy, translated by Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 8. Despite their great diversity the modern traditions spawned by Russell and Moore, Reichenbach and Dewey, and Kierkegaard and Marx share a common repugnance for the speculative sweep of Hegel's philosophical sciences. 339 $40 l>ANIEL O. DAllLBTROM religious faith in the indeterminate gamut of language-games. Marxists (and Freudians) consider religious faith an ideological sedative and even religious existentialists insist that religious faith is a matter of choice, a leap that is only hindered by the weight of a metaphysical system. In the following paper it is not my purpose to explain why these various strands of the modern mentality reject Hegel's view of the relation of philosophy and religion. However, an insight into the character of modern philosophical culture can perhaps be gleaned from a clear perception of what it universally rejects. Indeed, Hegel argues his thesis systematically and historically and both focuses provide important clues, not only to the contemporary rejection of that mutual accountability, but also to the contemporary state of philosophy itself. Feuerbach and Marx are often credited with fashioning a religious model of ideology and then applying that model to philosophies (including Hegel's) . Yet it is Hegel who puts such a model to devastating use in his assessment of philosophies which do not fulfill religion's need for philosophy but simply replicate religion in secular fashion. Hegel's historical argument for the mutual accountability of religion and philosophy is based on a critical account of a religious model of cognition within modern philosophy from the time of Descartes.2 2 Curiously this theme, which is interwoven in Hegel's views on religion, philosophy , and history, is largely overlooked by scholars. Some have duly recognized the role of the Lutheran Reformation in Hegel's own thinking. See Karl LOwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, translated by David E. Green (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 32-33. Identifying the spirit of Hegel and Kierkegaard, Stephen Crites rightly emphasizes the self-conscious dependence of Hegel's own philosophical perspective on his "Lutheranism," viewed as "the modern Protestant culture in which as he [Hegel] sees it, the Christian religion and the secular order have so permeated one another as to be indistinguishable." See Stephen Crites, In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel v. Kierkegaard on Faith and History (Chalmersburg, Pennsylvania: American Academy of Religion, 1972), p. 51. In this regard Crites echoes a theme, not only of LOwith, but also tof Fackenheim: "For if for Hegel the truth of Spirit is already disclosed in life the disclosure is found-or found decisively-in religious life, reaching its fullness in modern Protestant Christianity." See Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in MUTUAL NEED AND FRUSTRATION...