Hegel in Stuttgart 178588

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Hegel in Stuttgart (1785-88)

• The pragmatic theory of history writing in the
  in Hegels Enlightenment high school.
• Scholarship is not self-justifying.
• Voltaires Philosophy of History
• a. History includes cultural and
  institutional history, not just political
  history.
• b. It includes Oriential as well as
  Judeo-Christian history.
• c. History writing as a struggle of reason
  against superstition

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• 4. Hegels critique of Voltaire.
• a. Prejudice cannot be fought by prejudice.
• b. Superstition and popular religion are to be
  understood, not destroyed.
• c. Understanding is a condition of reform

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Hegels Shift to Romantic View of History Writing

• Understanding of prejudice, superstition, etc. is
  a condition of true reform.
• Feeling, phantasy and religion are to be
  appreciated as the peoples avenue to reason.
• Hegel as a Hellenistic Romantic, celebrating and
  seeking to restore the achievement of classical
  Athens, which was an impossible dream because
  that achievement was unique.
• a. Greek poets were original. Experience
  preceded concepts.

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• b. Modern culture is unoriginal and scholarly
  first come established words, then concept, and
  at last artificial experience. (Yet Hegels
  personality was scholarly he did not wallow in
  subjectivity and feeling.)
• 4. National histories are not parallel, each
  being unique and unrepeatable.
• 5. Hence the only lesson of the past is that
  there is no lesson to be learned from the past.
• 6. Concept of world history emerges as a
  succession of national histories.
• 7. History is a series of revolutionary
  renaissances, by which each nation produces
  novelty in attempting to recover a past golden
  age.

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Hegel in Tubingen (1788-93)

• Passage from liberal humanistic secondary school
  to a fundamentalist seminary.
• Professor Storr rejected higher Biblical
  criticism. Prophesy and mircales are to be
  literally interpreted.
• a. Human knowledge cannot contradict Biblical
  Revelation.
• b. Christian dogmas are reintroduced as Kantian
  postulates of practical reason.
• c. Kantian moral argument for divinity of Christ
  is asserted. (Hegel agreed, except Christ was not
  the only living embodiment of the Kantian moral
  ideal in history.)

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Hegels Revolt against Storr

• Following Lessings deathbed confession,
  Spinozism is the only rational philosophy.
  Spinozas pantheism was rational while
  creationism was not, since pantheism consistently
  asserts an infinite God, while the infinite
  Creator God is contradictorily finite and limited
  by creation. God is creator, not created.
• Yet Spinozism atheism materialism
  pantheism. (Jacobi subsituted superational faith
  for Spinozistic reason.)
• But Goethe and Herder denied equation of
  Spinozism and atheism and determinism, and Hegel
  with Holderlin followed.
• God is the One in the All (Lessing). Their slogan
  was Reason and Freedom, Spinoza and Kant.
• The One is experienced in communion with nature,
  not just known intellectually in Spinozas
  logical system of philosophy.

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• 6. The One in the All is Platos world soul, a
  cosmic community of individual souls.
  (Panentheism)
• 7. Hegel now accepted Kants critique of
  metaphysical knowledge The metaphysics of the
  One and All is but a postulate of practical
  reason making Freedom possible.
• 8. The One in the All is first the Kingdom of God
  in Heaven, and the French Revolution is the start
  of the descent of the Kingdom to earth.
• 9. With Kant, Hegel rejects original sin.
  Salvation comes by moral virtue.

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• 10. But Hegel rejects Kants purely rational
  morality. Man is a creature of heart, too.
• 11. World history is the education of the human
  race (Lessing). The stage of purely rational
  motivation (autonomy) comes only at the end of
  history.
• 12. Enlightenment of the people requires a reform
  of their religion. Hegel projects a new folk
  religion as a pedagogical ideal.
• 13. The ideal folk religion must be public, not
  just private. And it must be subjective religion
  (pietistic), not just objective religion
  (theological dogma).

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• 14. Dogmas of subjective religion are limited to
  God and immortality as Kantian postulates of
  practical reason. This prevents conflict between
  faith and reason (Moses Mendelssohn.)
• 15. Prime historical example of a rational folk
  religion is classical Athens, not Israel, which
  is despotic.
• 16. Folk religions of different nations should
  agree in rational creed, but differ ceremonially,
  linguistically, and mythically. (Nathan the
  Wise.)
• 17. Rational folk religion is based on Love,
  which doubles and Reason for the common people.

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• 18. Dogmatic theology is based not on reason but
  on abstractions of the understanding, which is
  the letter that kills the spirit.

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Hegel in Bern (1793-96)

• Hegels interest shifts from what to teach to how
  to teach it.
• The ideal is not utopian, since Athens once
  realized it, so it can touch earth again.
• Socrates and Jesus as the two great teachers of
  the past need to be meditated. Oral teachers.
• Todays teachers writes books, invisible pulpits
  that put distance between the teacher and the
  people.
• Jesus represents the contradiction of
  authoritarian emancipation.

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• 6. But Hegels situation is closer to Jesus than
  Socrates. He must operate in an authoritarian
  society used to servility.
• 7. Protestant principles of conscience and the
  universal priesthood of believers mark the
  transition from religious infancy to rational
  maturity (Lessing).
• 8. But the Reformation has degenerated into an
  authoritarian stress on the letter.
• 9. Reason was reborn theoretically in the
  Enlightenment and practically in the French
  Revolution.

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• 10. Thus Christianity potential as a rational
  folk religion must be explored.
• 11. Hegel now rejects the Christ of theology in
  favor of Jesus as a teacher of virtue.
• 12. Salvation is not salvation from the wages of
  sin by a leap of faith with the expectation of a
  reward, but sacrifice of ones finite self, so
  one is reborn in Jesus Love, and Love Reason
  (Gospel of John).
• 13. Jesus resisted reliance on miracles expected
  by the Jewish people. He resisted the temptation
  of power.

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• 14. Miraculous healings were due to moral
  conversion by lifting the weight of sin.
• 15. Jesus as a Greek among Jews, and that is why
  he failed among his Jewish people.

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• HEGEL IN FRANKFURT (1795-1801)
• Hegel comes under the influence of his poet
  friend Holderlin, whose aesthetic idealism, based
  more on Kants third critique, replaces Kant
  moral idealism.
• Theoretical reason means the domination of the
  subject by the object. Practical reason is the
  domination of the object by the subject. Neither
  is true freedom, true oneness of subject and
  object. True freedom is emancipation from all
  forms of bondage or domination.

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• 3. True freedom is embodied Love, which is the
  absolute identity of theory and practice. To love
  the other is practical, but is also to know the
  others needs. In Love (Christ) one sacrifices
  ones narrow egoism and is reborn in a whole
  including the other.
• 4. In Hegels development love becomes life,
  which becomes self-knowing spirit.
• 5. Love and Freedom for Hegel and Holderlin are
  no longer a mere postulate practical reason,
  since all practical reason expresses domination,
  not love between equals. Hegel, through
  Holderlin, thus frees himself from Kant and
  Fichte.

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• INTRODUCTION TO HEGELS DIALECTIC
• Human beings fall away from Love and Reason by
  the Understanding, which is the mental faculty of
  abstracting and absolutizing an x as if its
  correlative y did not exist. Love and Reason are
  regain on the self-conscious level only after
  this fall, by negating the fallen self-separated
  selfs negation of the other.
• Stages in a complete dialectical cycle
  abstraction, absoltutization, abstraction of the
  other, negation of the other, negation of the
  negation (of ones negation of the other).

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• 3. The dialectic is an historical
  self-constructive development.
• 4. Absolitization of what has been abstracted
  from the organic whole is the thesis. It is a
  contradictory assumption in Indirect Proof, since
  in reality the absolutized x is what it is only
  in and through y.
• 5. Negation of the absolutization of x is the
  antithesis.
• 6. Negation of the negation, of thoughts
  negation of y is the synthesis.
• 7. The dialectical method, as distinct from the
  dialectical, is an empathetic reconstruction or
  reenactment of the dialectic.

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• 8. The best known illustration of the dialectic
  is the dialectic of lordship and bondage. The
  lord abstracts and absolutizes himself as the
  only self, negating the selfhood of the bondsman,
  whom he reduces to a mere thing. But the bondsman
  is necessary to the lord as lord, but the lord
  notes the selfhood of the bondsmen only to negate
  it in order to reaffirm himself as the abolute
  self. The bondsman responds by negating the
  self-absolutization of the lord. The lord thus
  calls negation of himself upon himself by the
  bondsman. The lord, himself negated by the
  negated bondsmen, overcomes self-contradiction of
  excluding his necessary other by redefining
  himself no longer as lord, by encompassing the
  other self as an equal self in an expanded social
  definition of himself. The bond of a community of
  equals, each identifying with each other within
  the whole, replaces lordship and bondage.