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Kierkegaard contra Hegel on the ‘Absolute Paradox’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Genia Schönbaumsfeld
Genia Schönbaumsfeld*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton, [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel propounds three interrelated theses:

(1) The radical continuity of religion and philosophy:

The subject of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its objectivity, is God and nothing but God and the explication of God. Philosophy is not worldly wisdom, but knowledge of the non-worldly, not knowledge of the outer substance, of empirical being and life, but knowledge of what is eternal, of what God is and what emanates from his nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Philosophy therefore explicates itself only by explicating religion, and by thus explicating itself, explicates religion … Hence religion and philosophy collapse into each other; philosophy is indeed itself religious service [Gottesdienst]. (Hegel 1986c: 28)

(2) The view that philosophy renders in conceptual form the essence of what Christianity consists in and thus transcends the merely subjective vantage-point of faith:

In philosophy religion obtains its justification from the thinking consciousness … Faith already contains the true content, but it still misses the form of thought. All previously considered forms — feeling, representation — can have the content of truth, but they themselves are not the true form which makes the true content necessary. Thought is the absolute judge before whom the content needs to prove and justify itself, (ibid.: 341)

(3) Philosophy alone shows Christianity to be rational and necessary:

This vantage-point [of philosophy] is therefore the justification of religion, especially of the Christian, the true religion; it apprehends [erkennen] the content in its necessary form [nach seiner Notwendigkeit], according to reason; at the same time it also knows the forms in the development of this content. (ibid.: 339)

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2: number 59/60 , 2009 , pp. 54 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2009

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References

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