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Philosophy, Religion, and the End of Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

John Walker
John Walker*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Abstract

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

A new epoch has arisen in the world. It seems as if the world spirit has succeeded in casting off everything in objective reality which is alien to itself, in order to comprehend itself as absolute spirit: to produce its own objective world from itself and to keep that world serenely in its own power. The struggle of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which once appeared as an alien reality, is now coming to an end. The finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and, by the same token, the absolute self-consciousness has achieved the reality which it formerly lacked. The whole of world history and especially the history of philosophy is the representation of this conflict. History now seems to have achieved its goal, when the absolute self-consciousness is no longer something alien; when the spirit is real as spirit. For spirit is this only when it knows itself to be absolute spirit; and this it knows in speculative science (Wissemchaft).

Type
Hegel and Religion
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 24 , Issue 1-2: number 47/48 , 2003 , pp. 61 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2003

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References

1 My translation, from Hegel, G. W. F.: Werke, edited Glockner, Hermann, Stuttgart, 1928, Vol. 19, pp. 689–90Google Scholar.

2 Adapted from Rose's, Gillian translation, in Hegel Contra Sociology, London, Athlone, 1981, pp. 118–119 Google Scholar; cf. Hegel, Werke, edited Glockner, , Vol.16, pp. 355–356 Google Scholar. This passage is not included in the most recent English edition of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited Hodgson, Peter C., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988 Google Scholar. This edition is based on Hegel's manuscript of 1827, and will be referred to hereafter as LPR.

3 Rose, loc. cit.

4 op. cit, p. 92.

5 In this respect Hegel's 1831 manuscript differs sharply from that of 1827 (cf. LPR pp. 488-89).

6 Fackenheim, Emil: The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 117 Google Scholar.

7 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992, p. 39ff Google Scholar. (hereafter EH).

8 This translation follows Glockner's edition of Hegel's 1831 manuscript and is in my view closer to Hegel's meaning than the subheading ‘Community, Spirit’ in LPR. See LPR p. 470ff.; cf. Werke 16, p. 308ff.

9 See Shanks, Andrew: Hegel's Political Theology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 16ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Macintyre, Alasdair: Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London, Duckworth, 1988, p. 361ff.Google Scholar

11 See Fukuyama, : ‘The End of History?’ in The National Interest, Summer 1989, p. 18 Google Scholar:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

This is from an earlier and more succinct statement of the argument of EH.

12 Troeltsch, Ernst: The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, London, SCM Press, 1972, pp. 128–9Google Scholar.

13 Newman, J.H.: An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Notre Dame, 1979, pp. 86–93 (‘Notional and Real Assents Contrasted’)Google Scholar.