Epilogue: Bildung and politics: The “first class,” Christian pride, and “absolute spirit”

Summary

A neat summary statement of the issues this study has tried to raise, confront, and resolve is not easy, for my contextualist commitment to “thick description” makes such an exercise somewhat gratuitous. So, rather than be redundant, I shall conclude this study with a brief description of “Protestant Bildung,” a conception that, I think, brings Hegel's ideas on the theology of history; on praxis pietatis, civil piety, and the Second Reformation; on Sittlichkeit and its relation to social and political theory; and on the eschatological dimension of self-realizing teleology into coherent focus.

A convenient point of departure for this undertaking can be found in the main thesis of Part III of this study: in the argument that in the 1790s and early 1800s Hegel was a critic of what he called the “bourgeois” conception of ethical life. In that context, we need only remember that Hegel had argued for a separation of the bourgeois system of need from the bourgeois system of recognition and that he had tried to replace the latter with one with more “substantive” ethical content. In his terms, he proposed to substitute a system of absolute Sittlichkeit for a system of natural Sittlichkeit.

In light of what we know he had said during these years about Sittlichkeit in general and about the relationship between Tapferkeit and “bad infinity” in particular, it would not be a distortion to say that in the early 1800s Hegel was working with a conceptual framework within which the ideas of “pride” and “avarice” figured prominently.