Abstract
The relationships between atheism and modernity are complex, broad and often contradictory. In Dobrowolski’s exposition of the problem, dialectics is used to give order to a manifold and multilayered material, which is presented in the classic scheme of a triad: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The assumption, however, is not that dialectics is the objective or ultimate truth of this material. It is only a way of grasping it—and if this way brings about any objective truth, the better for the whole inquiry. This, as a whole, shall proceed under the Hegelian auspices, as Dobrowolski assumes very generally after Hegel that modernity is about emancipation, and also employs some of Hegel’s particular remarks about religion to support his analyses.
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Notes
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Piousness in its pre-modern sense is defined thus by Hegel: “Faith is still presupposed as existing irrespective of, and without opposition to, anything else. To believe in God is thus in its simplicity, something different from that where a man, with reflection and with the consciousness that something else stands opposed to this faith, says, ‘I believe in God.’ Here the need of justification, of inference, of controversy, has already come in. Now that religion of the simple, godly man is not kept shut off and divided from the rest of his existence and life, but, on the contrary, it breathes its influence over all his feelings and actions, and his consciousness brings all the aims and objects of his worldly life into relation to God, as to its infinite and ultimate source” (Hegel 1895, 7).
References
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1895. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Trans. Ebenezer Brown Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner.
———. 2001. Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books.
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Dobrowolski, J. (2020). Modernity and Secularism. In: Wróbel, S., Skonieczny, K. (eds) Atheism Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2_2
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