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Chapter 3: Doing the Work of Spirit: G.W. F. Hegel
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65 Doing the Work of Spirit G. W. F. Hegel The discussions in Chapters 1 and 2 map two conceptual axes that continue to define the terms of contemporary debates over “religion ”: one stretching between a core of religion and its phenomenal forms and a second, within that definition of core, stretching between rational belief and inner experience. Chapters 3 and 4 engage this terrain in ways that open a third dimension: that between “religion” (so defined by these two axes) and the scientific study of it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) articulates this distinction as a way to accomplish what he perceives Kant and Schleiermacher do not: to offer a theory of religion that is both affirming and critical. Kierkegaard contests Hegel’s solution and evokes the image of dancing to figure what Hegel’s “Science” of religion is incapable of comprehending . In setting up the opposition between dancing and philosophical writing, Kierkegaard’s response to Hegel suggests that a particular kind of disregard for “dance” arises as an enabling correlate of the emergence narrative of the field. losing religion Hegel’s critiques of the theories of religion represented in this book by Kant and Schleiermacher drive the argument of his first great chapter 3 philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806).1 After years as headmaster at the Gymnasium in Nurenberg, and then as a professor at the Universities of Heidelberg (1816-8) and Berlin (18181831 ), Hegel returned to flesh out the implications of his critiques, offering a series of lectures on the “philosophy of religion,” which he gave in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831. Although Hegel never assembled these lectures for publication, scholars have pieced them together from his notes and those of students.2 While the specifics of his analyses evolve over the ten-year period, his underlying critique is consistent : the theories of religion represented by the likes of Kant and Schleiermacher fail (with echoes of Schleiermacher) because they fail to affirm the particularity of the myriad historical manifestations of religion.The problem Hegel discerns is that such thinkers, in the rush to provide a rational defense of religion, yield the terms of the argument to those they seek to persuade. They predicate their theories on a distinction between reason and experience authorized by the successes of “science.” Not only do they take this distinction as given, they also emphasize one side of the distinction as representing a core or concept of religion over and against the other that to them represents its external forms. For Hegel, it is in this sense that their theories are one-sided and “theological.” They are “theological” in so far as neither approach is able to support as positive another human’s claims to the absolute. Religious symbols, doctrines, or actions— including instances of dance—can appear only as arbitrary if imaginative elaborations of either a rational belief or an experience of sensory immersion. We have seen as much in the chapters above. The examples Hegel gives demonstrate the stakes of his critique and gesture towards his response. On the one hand, Hegel insists that identifying the core of religion with rational belief in God breeds a nearly “universal indifference toward the doctrines of faith formerly regarded as essential” (LPR 82).Through such a lens, the “work of salvation ” attributed to Jesus Christ by orthodox dogmatics, for example, assumes mere “psychological” significance (LPR 82). The same holds 66 Between Dancing and Writing [35.173.181.0] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:24 GMT) true for articles of faith, the Trinity, miracles, and eternal life.As Hegel observes, the situation is such that “the educated public” and “many theologians” would be “embarrassed to have to declare” themselves about such claims (LPR 83). In ceding the terms of the debate to scientific culture, such theories and theologies lose the ability to affirm the positive content of religious traditions. On the other hand, Hegel insists, a philosophy of religion that locates the core of religion in an irreducible moment of experience fares no better in affirming the particular forms and content of religious life. While such an approach honors the capacity of humans to sense infinity, it does so by denying cognition an active role in religion : “The immediacy of the connectedness is taken as precluding the alternative determination of mediation . . . one knows that God is, not what God is. The expansion, the content, the fulfillment of the representation of God is thus negated” (LPR 87-8). When scholars take...