Proper to the human sciences is what they, by virtue of their own history and above all of the prejudices associated with it, have admitted as being par excellence human. But it is quite obvious that this human/inhuman division is drawn from within, or rather at the limit of our fields of knowledge concerning humanity. Now this limit or these limits are coextensive with the ideal definition of the human being in the names of which these inquiries are undertaken and these boundaries drawn. Judged ‘human’ by the human sciences are the activities, creations, and attitudes that are considered by us Westerners as the unchanging, ideal characteristics of the consummate human being (art, social life, religion, symbolic productions), whence our propensity to so easily award the credentials of humanity to anyone who fits this ideal. Conversely, in order to be fully ‘human,’ our human sciences would have to abandon everything that the West (Stoic, Christian, scientific, democratic) has patiently screened out so as to grace itself with an idealized image. But it is precisely this radical experiment that is inconceivable, since it would bring down at a blow the whole edifice (already shaky) on which our civilization is founded.
DUBUISSON, The Western Construction of Religion1
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Der Gegenstand dieser Vorlesungen ist die Religionsphilosophie (Sie hat im allgemeinen, [im] ganzen denselben Zweck als die vormalige metaphysische Wissenschaft hatte, die man theologia naturalis nannte, unter der man den Umfang desjenigen verstand, was die bloße Vernunft von Gott wissen könne—die bloße im Unterschied einer positiven, geoffenbarten Religion, einer Religion, die man von anderswoher als aus der Vernunft wisse), und der Gegenstand der Religion selbst ist der höchste, der absolute, (das, was schlechthin wahrhaft ist,) (was die Wahrheit selbst ist): die Region, in der all Rätsel der Welt, alle Widersprüche des Gedankens, alle Schmerzen des Gefühls gelöst sind—die Region der ewigen Wahrheit und
HEGEL, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I [M], 3der ewigen Ruhe, der absoluten Wahrheit selbst. Das, wodurch der Mensch sich vom Tier unterscheidet, ist das Bewußtsein, der Gedanke, und alle davon ausgehenden Unterschiede der Wissenschaften, Künste, und der menschlichen Verhältnisse, Gewohnheiten und Sitten, Tätigkeiten und Geschicklichkeiten, Genüsse, finden ihren letzten Mittelpunkt in dem Einen Gedanken Gottes; es ist der Ausgangspunkt von allem und das Ende von allem; von ihm nimmt [alles] seinen Anfang, und ihn geht alles zurück.
∵
What follows is in many ways another attempt to define the concept of religion, to determine its limits.2 However, if I have been interested in determining the limits of ‘religion,’ it has not been to define it in the traditional sense of the term, which would mean as much as to conserve or preserve it; rather, I have been merely interested in surveying it, tracing its limes and lineages, checking its conceptual walls for weakness, cracks, and even breaches in the hopes of being able to get a sense of the future of religion, of this notoriously difficult to define concept, whose future may very well be our own.
As with all concepts or categories, the concept of religion is im Begriff (as Hegel reminds us), which means that it is always about to; it is always in the
If such critiques have shown anything, it is that the future of religion cannot be separated from its function. If religion functions to authorize and consolidate the identity of the so-called West at the expense of the rest—as such authors argue—then the task of defining religion is never descriptive, but normative. Indeed, Western scholars have long employed the term to divide and subjugate, bestowing the status of full humanity on some (the followers of the ‘true’ religion) while rendering others as deficient, incomplete, or even inhuman. In some ways such insights are far from new. Indeed, Hegel argues similarly in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and in his Encyclopedia, albeit with an approving rather than a critical attitude. According to Hegel, the practice of religion (re)produces the modern human being, insofar as it is through religion that the human being purifies itself of its nonhuman or animal drives or attributes. This process of purification is at the same time a process of repulsion, expulsion, and distancing, in which the (rational, human) soul ultimately achieves separation from its (irrational, animal) body.
To be sure this process of purification does not merely take place in the soul; it is reflected in the religions and geographies of the world. In his various treatments of religion, Hegel begins with those religions which, both spiritually and geographically, appear to his eyes most distant (the magic of the Eskimos and the sorcery of African tribes) and ends with those nearest to
Although Germany’s legacy of colonialism may not be quite as marked as that of its Western European neighbors, its contributions are, in fact, many. That Germany’s colonial history has historically received relatively little attention arguably has something to do with the fact that Germany was (like in many things) late to the game. Only with the Scramble for Africa well into the latter half of the 19th century does Germany become a colonial power in any way comparable to England or France. Still, over the last decade, Germans have begun to acknowledge this past, even if there remains much work to be done. In 2021, after years of negotiations, the German government officially recognized the genocide committed by the Bismark regime against the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908—the first genocide of the 20th-century.5 While it is easy to belittle this acknowledgement as merely ‘formal,’ it affords an opportunity to reflect more deeply upon the imbrication between antisemitism and racism more generally, between the holocaust and Germany’s colonialist ambitions.
Even if Kant and Hegel (and especially Hegel) are generally credited with lending the nascent National Socialist movement its intellectual fodder,6 it is also the case that both Kant’s racial theories (as well as, for that matter, his theory of cosmopolitanism in which Europe, in the end, comes to be identified with reason and reasonable governance) and Hegel’s hierarchical ordering of world history contributed to a burgeoning colonial mindset. Indeed, an obvious, if until recently oft overlooked connection exists between Germany’s
Yet as Latour reminds us, this process of purification is self-defeating. No matter how total the machinery of separation and exclusion, the line between human and nonhuman, rational and irrational, does not simply engender distinctions, it also engenders hybrids—hybrids of human and nonhuman, of nature and spirit (or mind, culture, society, etc.), which forever delay and defer the result and, ultimately, doom attempts to purify the world to failure.9 Put simply, purification depends upon what it expels. The divisions that emerge from this process are never absolute in any conventional sense; rather, the two sides are entangled. Distinctions that arise out this process of purification depend upon on whatever came ‘before’ (even if this before is also always already a construction (dependent upon the after)), on what is ‘original’ or ‘natural.’
Hegel’s concept of religion follows a similar logic. While religion appears to be a process of purification whereby the human being transcends its natural,
This study aims to rethink religion by returning to the site of its mythical construction—not only as a Western category of hegemonic domination, but as a structure of thought that mediates between nature and spirit, the human and the nonhuman, especially the human and the animal. It is an attempt to question the role of ‘religion’ in the (re)production of those very hybrid structures which, as Latour argues, have come to characterize modernity. How might we imagine ‘religion’ as a genuinely ‘postmodern’ concept which no longer purifies (or creates hybrids), but resists such processes or else helps to reveal its inner workings?
While it is impossible to say for sure what such a religion would look like, it has become clear that we cannot responsibly engage in so-called religious studies without first reimagining religion for an age in which modernity and its concomitant terms of progress, reason, objectivity, etc., have revealed themselves to be tragically bound up with their opposites. It has long been common to label this age as a ‘post,’ as if we were living in, as Masuzawa puts it, “an extension—some kind of an afterlife, perhaps, for what it qualifies (structuralist, modern, industrial).”10 Of course, this ‘post’ might also “indicate a reversal of some sort, an atavistic return of what once was … a return of the pre-.”11 As I see it, this ‘post’ designates less a return of the pre- and more of a sign, even a revelation, for all our talk of the future, we are (still?) living in the past. We are living in an age without a future, if only because the ‘future’ belongs to that set of modern concepts which have never arrived or else have arrived stillborn.
If, in the end, we will not be able to imagine a future to religion, it is because neither religion nor the future can be thought outside of the conceptual matrix of modernity. In the end, we will not be inquiring into the future of religion,
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Yet before reaching such a foregone conclusion, we must ask ourselves, if our goal is to reimagine religion for a truly post-modern age, why would return to Hegel—the modern philosopher par excellence, a philosopher whose ‘religion’ remains irredeemably Christo- and Eurocentric? In part, it is this irredeemable quality, along with his undeniable influence on ‘religion’ as well as the discipline of religious studies which forces us to engage with Hegel and his legacy. Scholars working in the discipline of religious studies have long been suspicious of philosophy—especially of the continental variety—seeing it as but an extension of the most pernicious forms of theology, which would represent Christianity as the world’s paradigmatic (if not the only true) religion, according to which all other religions are to be judged. Seeing as the discipline of religious studies has been achieved by distancing itself from theology it is understandable (if philosophy is indeed inextricable from theology) that scholars of religion would attempt to distance themselves from philosophy as well. Yet the ignorance of philosophy does not benefit the discipline of religious studies—far from it; it only encourages the continued use of ‘theological’ concepts and categories in ways which, as the likes of Asad and Masuzawa have pointed out, perpetuate Western hegemony. Only by engaging with philosophy (and with Hegel’s philosophy in particular), does it become possible to critically dismantle these inherited frameworks.
To take an example: even as the academic study of religion continues to try to weasel its way out of accusations of Orientalism—that is, in Said’s second, more nefarious sense, as a mode of power that “authorizes views of [the Orient], describes it, teaches it, settles it, rules over it”12—scholars
The failure to confront Hegel, as Mandair claims, has made it all the more difficult to construct a “secular anti-imperialist critique” of colonialism.14 Mandair argues that—to develop a successful secular anti-imperialist critique of colonialism—we must first return to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History and disarm it by removing its “religio-spiritual underpinnings.”15 But if we wish to rid (Hegel’s) history of its religio-spiritual underpinnings, we need to have an adequate understanding of how religion functions in Hegel’s philosophy. For this, we need to turn not to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History but to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. To interrupt Hegel’s narrative of historical progress, we must first carry out a radical critique of Hegel’s concept of religion. To be sure, this quest to get to the roots of Hegel’s ‘religion,’ will necessarily lead us beyond the confines of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, strictly speaking. The religious movement of historical progress begins, according to Hegel, the moment that human beings become self-conscious and, in this way, distinguishes herself from other animals.16 More precisely, religion is self-consciousness (albeit of the two-pronged variety: human beings becoming conscious of God and/or Spirit and God and/or Spirit becoming conscious of itself).
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Hegel’s importance lies not only in having institutionalized religion as an object of philosophical inquiry within the university, but also in how he approached that object—not merely as an abstract or universal concept, but as a historically unfolding phenomenon composed of specific, ‘historical’ religions. In contrast to figures such as Locke, Hume, and Kant, who addressed religion largely in general or philosophical terms, Hegel turns to what he calls determinate religions in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of religion as such. This move, on the one hand, affirms the legitimacy of Masuzawa’s critique, insofar as it reveals the extent to which the category of ‘world religions’ depends upon the monolithic category of religion. But, on the other hand, it also demonstrates just how ‘modern’ Hegel himself remains. Although scholarly attention has typically focused on either the beginning or the end of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—that is, on the concept of religion as such, or on the consummate religion (namely, Christianity)—it is Hegel’s treatment of the determinate religions that remains most relevant, most recognizable, to students of religion today. From the so-called immediate ‘nature’ religions of ‘magic,’ Confucianism and Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Egyptian religion, to the more ‘spiritual’ religions of Judaism, Greek and Roman religion, and, of course, Christianity, Hegel’s schema maps surprisingly well onto the structure of most contemporary ‘world religions’ courses (with the notable exception of Islam, which Hegel largely ignores). Even if we have become rightly wary of dividing religions into the ‘natural’ and the ‘spiritual,’ or of offering up implicit rankings of any kind, we continue to rely on many of the same categories and classificatory schemata that Hegel helped to institutionalize.
To be sure, Hegel is not solely responsible for these categories and schemata, but, as the great synthesizer that he was, he was able to bring together many
Hegel’s conceptualization of religion as a manifestation of spirit and/or self-consciousness reflects a broader Enlightenment tendency to prioritize the inner, subjective world of Descartes’ (Jesuit) meditations, over the objective, material world in which real, lived history takes place. This understanding of religion has been rightly criticized by the likes of Asad (1993), but, as Dubuisson suggests, a thoroughgoing critique of this ‘religion’ would necessarily lead us to critique not only the distinction between belief and practice, inner and outer, public and private, etc., but the Cartesian division between the human and the nonhuman upon which this ‘religion’ has been constructed.18 Religion, like so many concepts in the humanities depends upon the distinction between human and nonhuman for its structural integrity. Indeed, we can go further and say that not only does ‘religion’ depend upon this line, it also (re)produces it.
As already indicated, Hegel defines religion as a kind of thinking—namely, a thinking about or on the divine. And it is by engaging in this kind of lofty thinking that humans ultimately distinguish themselves from other animals. As with philosophy, this form of thought requires practice and, indeed, can be described as a practice in and of itself. In essence, this is a religious practice—a practice that Hegel also refers to as a cultus. While it is through this religious practice or cultus that humans raise themselves above all other animals, it becomes clear when we inquire into the nature of this thinking in Hegel that thinking cannot so easily be separated from other, more ‘natural’ faculties.
the dialectical process is ‘plastic’ because, as it unfolds, it makes links between the opposing moments of total immobility (the ‘fixed’) and vacuity (‘dissolution’) and then links both in the vitality of the whole, a whole which, reconciling these two extremes, is itself the unity of resistance (Widerstand) and fluidity (Flüssigkeit). The process of plasticity is dialectical because the operations which constitute it, the seizure of form and the annihilation of form, emergence and explosion, are contradictory.19
In Hegel’s philosophy, logic, nature, and spirit constitute the three movements or moments in the dialectical life of the (absolute) idea. Unfortunately, this movement from logic to nature and from nature to spirit has often been characterized as a linear progression—one with a clear and definite ending. Kojève, as we will see, appears to conceive of the idea in precisely this way and, while his concerns regarding the end are justifiable, they are only justifiable if we ignore what the end itself engenders: namely, the possibility of beginning anew.
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In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève wonders whether, upon reaching absolute knowledge, everything ‘human’ comes to an end leading to what Allan Bloom terms a ‘reanimalization’ of the human being.20 In the state of absolute knowing, the opposition between subject and object, which otherwise defines human life, dissolves. Although Kojève does not take the time to fully explain why absolute knowledge might lead to the dissolution of all that is human, I argue in Chapter 1, “Reanimalizing Humanity,” that such an (im)possibility already suggests itself when we examine the role that habit or Gewohnheit plays in the development of spirit.
There, Hegel details the ascent of spirit from what he calls the natural and/or feeling soul to (self-)consciousness and highlights the role habit plays in this process. Habit appears, at least at first, to function as a bridge between nature and spirit, between the natural life-processes of nutrition, sensibility and locomotion, and the spiritual-life processes, of art, religion, and philosophy. By paying close attention to habit, we discover that (self-)consciousness, or the distinction between subject and object as distinguished in and through a particular subject, develops in and out of the life-process itself. Thus, nature and spirit are not to be viewed as two distinct ‘things,’ but as two aspects of the same thing: namely, spirit itself. In other words, the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason, between thought on the one hand and feeling on the other, reveals itself to have sprung from a single source: the self that has distinguished itself from itself through habit.
Although Hegel often emphasizes the unity of nature and spirit in his Berlin years, he nonetheless stresses the importance of distinguishing between human and animal and that on the basis of the distinction between thought and feeling. In Chapter 2, “The Religious Animal,” we examine Hegel’s growing preoccupation with what we might today call the question of the animal, tracing the impetus for this concern back to Hegel’s rather heated exchanges with the theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin. To combat Schleiermacher’s (and, to some extent, Jacobi’s) characterization of religion as a mere feeling, Hegel attempts to demonstrate reason’s ‘reasonableness’ by means of negative exemplification, arguing that ‘irrational’ animals, though capable of feeling, nonetheless lack religion. This defense of the reasonableness of religion
The likes of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte all attempt, or so Hegel argues, to win a truce between the warring factions of reason and religion by confining religion to the realm of unreason or else (in the case of Jacobi and Schleiermacher) to feeling. But such a solution appeases neither faith nor reason, since the absolute, the truth, demands that faith be(come) reasonable and unitary. Hegel is convinced that he can trace back the unity of faith and reason, thinking and feeling, to the Kantian idea of the ‘true I’ or the ‘original transcendental unity of apperception.’ The fact that thinking cannot be so easily divorced from feeling means for the human being at any rate, that it is impossible to define religion as a feeling since it is always already informed or influenced by thought and vice versa. Although Hegel argues vehemently in his preface or “Vorrede” to H.F.W Hinrichs’ Die Religion im inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft and elsewhere that, contra Jacobi and Schleiermacher, religion cannot have its seat in feeling, this does not mean that religion does not have anything to do with feeling. Indeed, for religion to become actual, it must descend into feeling by becoming a habit or second nature (a fact which we will explore more fully in Chapter 4).
In Chapter 3, “The Becoming of Consciousness,” we take a more detailed look into what the transition from nature to spirit, from the feeling soul to consciousness involves, paying closer attention to the role that habit plays in this transition or passing over, especially habit as skill. We will discover that habit functions to purify the soul of its natural elements and drives and replace such elements and drives with ones of another, spiritual nature. Yet in the end Hegel’s account of the transition or passing-over from nature to spirit in the Encyclopedia can only take us so far. Ultimately, the transition from nature to spirit, from feeling-soul to consciousness, cannot be made with the help of habit alone; rather, the transition depends upon what amounts to a divine encounter. This much becomes clear in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (especially those from 1824).22 In and through the encounter with the infinite, the human
In Chapter 4, “Expressing Spirit,” we examine how spirit comes to expression in and through the human body and in language. While in Chapter 3 we discover that consciousness depends upon the death or sacrifice of the animal, this is but the beginning. For spirit to develop, it must continue to distance itself from all that is natural, moving away from the animal or from animal sacrifice to a spiritual sacrifice modeled on language. However, the act of speaking or naming involves another kind of sacrifice: the sacrifice of nature, of the sensual. Even at higher levels of spirit, spirit demands the death of the animal, its sacrifice, for its self-expression. Speech is dependent on the animal voice which is, at the same time, the voice of death.
The Western Construction of Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 183.
Such attempts are myriad and reflect the general unease surrounding the definition of religion. We can think back to the likes of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, J.Z. Smith, and Melford Spiro, but also of Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade. See, for example, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (Fortress Press, 1991); J.Z. Smith’s Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and his chapter in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, “Religion, Religions, Religious” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998), 269–84; and Melford Spiro “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (Routledge, 2004). Going further back, see, Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1987); Geertz’ The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Douglas’ Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 2002). Such ‘classical’ approaches to defining religion have left many contemporary scholars questioning the practicality of such attempts, advocating for a ‘lived’ approach to religion that largely avoids questions of (theoretical) definition (while, in the process, (re)defining what religion ‘is’). See, Nancy Tatom Ammerman’s Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Meredith B. McGuire’s Religion in Social Context (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997); and Robert A. Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (Cumberland: Yale University Press, 2010).
Here I am thinking especially of Asad’s Genealogies of Religion Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Masuzawa’s In Search of Dreamtime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Dubuisson’s The Western Construction of Religion. While we will not be able to do full justice to their arguments here, Asad, Masuzawa, and Dubuisson together make a compelling case that ‘religion’ has never been a purely descriptive term. Asad famously argues, in Foucauldian fashion, that religion is not some abstract set of beliefs or inner experiences, but a term of power—a tool, so to speak, of Western dominance. Religion, in other words, is not a universal category, except insofar as religion reflects a certain Western claim to universalism. Masuzawa expands on this critique in In Search of Dreamtime by examining how 19th-century attempts to move beyond the universalism of ‘religion,’ through the creation of the category ‘world religions,’ only served to universalize Western, European scholars’ assumptions about religion as such. Similarly, Dubuisson argues that ‘religion’ is a Western construction that, owing to its local heritage, fails to translate across cultures and can only be applied in non-Western contexts with a great deal of interpretive and political force.
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford Univ. Press, 2011).
deutschlandfunk.de, “Rassendenken Teil 1—Über die rassistischen Wurzeln von Wissenschaft,” Deutschlandfunk, June 14, 2020, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/rassendenken-teil-1-ueber-die-rassistischen-wurzeln-von-100.html.
The classic discussion of this issue can be found in McGovern’s From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy (AMS Press, 1973), 259–252; for a more recent discussion (in which the shadows of Kant and Hegel appear throughout), see Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers (Yale University Press, 2013).
Works explicitly connecting Germany’s colonialist endeavors with its thousand-year Reich aspirations have become more numerous in the last 20 years or so, beginning with Zimmerer’s article, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” in which Zimmerer argues that it is only by understanding the colonialist roots of Nazi policies that we can comprehend why so many people enthusiastically endorsed genocidal and/or expansionist ideas. For a review of various continuity theses, arguing for a link between 19th (and 20th) century colonialism and Nazism, see Kühne’s article, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 339–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2013.821229.
Cf., Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Indeed, not only did the Nazis use the category of religion to purify the populace, but they also turned their attention purifying Christianity as such from its Jewish roots. For more on this, see Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993).
In Search of Dreamtime, 13.
In Search of Dreamtime, 13.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Vintage books, 1979), 3.
Arvind-Pal Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2009), 108.
Religion and the Specter of the West, 108.
Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West, 109.
Here we come to a crucial intersection with Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenic machine, which (re)produces the human as a distinct category at the expense of an (animal) other. This machine, which establishes the human as superior to the animal, also works to divide the world into the haves and the have-nots—or, more precisely, to (re)distribute the humanistic goods of rights, sovereignty, freedom, etc., in the direction of the haves. For more, see Agamben’s, The Open (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Jon Stewart, Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World: The Logic of the Gods (Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–4.
Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, 183.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel (Routledge, 2005), 12.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Cornell University Press, 1969), XII.
Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, first published in 1817 in Heidelberg and again in 1827 in Berlin, did not receive its final form until the 1830 edition. We will here be referring to the 1830 edition unless otherwise noted.
To gain a full understanding of this ‘transition,’ it does not suffice to focus on Hegel’s account in the Encyclopedia, if only because this account, appearing as it does in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, is necessarily one-sided. While reading Hegel, it is important to resist conceiving of the development of spirit as a kind of linear progression from one stage to the next. To be sure, Hegel himself presents the development of spirit as a succession of stages, even as a certain kind of history, but, in truth, every stage is but a moment in a logical chain that must ultimately be conceived as a single thought. The various stages of spirit’s development, in other words, are best conceived of as various layers or levels, which, though they can be individually analyzed, nonetheless coexist as parts of a larger structure. As we shall see, especially in Chapter 2, the faculties of thinking and feeling can certainly be separated from each other for analytical purposes, but in truth they are one. Hegel, like other phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, recognizes that the analytical mindset does not necessarily get at the truth of the matter, even if it can be very helpful for the realization of certain ends. All this is to say that Hegel’s account of the transition from the feeling soul to consciousness should be viewed as a minimal or preliminary characterization. In truth, the transition from nature to spirit occurs at multiple, higher levels of spirit as well; indeed, this becomes most apparent in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, especially those from 1824. Admittedly, it is a dangerous thing to engage in a synchronous or holistic reading of Hegel—or that is, a reading that attempts to apprehend the totality of the system at once. As important as it is to analyze, to break down and track the diachronic development of Hegel’s thought, it is just as important to step back and attempt to describe Hegel’s thought as if it were a singular, unified organism. While it is certainly crucial to remain attentive to the various changes in the presentation of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (changes that Walter Jaeschke and others have so painstakingly traced), it is equally crucial to follow the cue of Marheineke and attempt to show how, despite the shifts in formulation, it is still possible to think the Lectures as a single, if constantly evolving, work. This, at any rate, is my approach: a search for continuity, an effort to identify where, across the Hegelian corpus, Hegel attempts to say the same thing in different ways.