Abstract
I shall here provide a general and introductory account of certain of Hegel’s most basic concepts with the aim of showing how these provide background and context for his philosophy of religion. Principal among these will be the concept of thought as mediation (Vermittlung), the concept of contradiction (Widerspruch), the concept of unity, or the monistic principle, and the concept of the concrete universal. I shall be particularly interested in these concepts as they pertain to Hegel’s philosophical method. In defining these concepts, I shall inevitably make statements which may be found to require justification which it is impractical to attempt to supply in this chapter. In some of these cases I shall refer the reader to more detailed treatments. Some issues will doubtless be raised in the mind of the thoughtful reader to which the papers which follow will speak more definitively. Following some preliminary definitions, I shall attempt to illustrate the concepts defined.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
There is also the soul that is “the idea in nature.” This soul, however, is regarded as potential thought, and is not in a unique sense the substance of the mind.
The need to define “meaning” so broadly in this exposition is owing to the widely varied forms of transformation of thought content which Hegel regards as dialectical. This presents one of the major problems for Hegel scholarship, which is taken up in section VII of this volume.
Phän, pp. 92-7, or Phen, pp. 162-7.
Whether and to what extent Hegel’s interest in displaying such an identity is dominant in each of the various parts of his philosophy is open to some question. This interest is less dominant in Müller’s Hegel than it is generally regarded. Gustav Emil Müller, Hegel: Denkesgeschichte eines Lebendigen (München: Francke Verlag, 1959), and “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (1942), pp. 411-4.
Phän, “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft,” pp. 148–58, or, Phen, “Lordship and Bondage,” pp. 229-40.
Wallace, pp. 236f.
Phän, pp. 283-92, or Phen, pp. 390-400.
The deduction of the concept of Herr Krug’s pen by appeal to the dialectic of the thing and its attributes might have gone some way toward clarifying the relation he held to obtain between everyday concepts and what were proposed as the forms of dialectic, had he been less aloof to public polemics with his contemporaries as individuals.
These developments to which the order would seem to be of less obvious and crucial significance belong to the upper reaches of the dialectic, for the most part within the dialectic of the Notion. In these, a primary consideration in the determination of order, I believe, is the definitions, dialectically derived, which issue from different possible orders. The order of the dialectic determines which concepts are to be conceived as related to which other concepts by the part-whole relationship. Especially when these developments are kept in mind, Hegel’s system takes on the character of a tremendous language game, played not merely with common language, but with the basic concepts of philosophy as well. As Hegel plays this game, some relatively common concepts, such as objectivity, matter, thing, and duty, are defined in such a way as to render them less than common. Such definitions are meant to be prescriptive, and are deliberate plays in the game. Certainly many of the plays in the game are not justified by considerations of definitions alone. The placement of the dialectic of space and time high in the order of the dialectic, for example, must be held to express Hegel’s version of the empirical principle, for which he found sufficient justification.
Die Philosophie des Geistes, III, pp. 206f. Most of the contents of this paragraph are drawn from pp. 204-7. For a more extensive treatment, see my “Hegel’s Phenomenological Analysis and Freud’s Psychoanalysis,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 3 (September, 1968), pp. 356-378 (hereafter, “Hegel-Freud”); and “The Theory of Mental Derangement and the Role and Function of Subjectivity in Hegel,” The Personalist, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 433-452. For a further development from Hegel’s theory of the unconscious, see my “Toward a Phenomenologically-Grounded Theory of the Unconscious for the Scientific Practice of Psychotherapy,” Existential Psychiatry, Fall, 1970 (to appears).
These feeling determinations of the natural man are roughly approximate to Freud’s preconceptual cathexis of libido in that in both cases feeling becomes attached to specific modes of activity. In the case of Freud these are specified as sexual in nature, and are typed according to the area of the body, or “erogenous zone,” where this feeling attachment is centered. Hegel, consistent with his phenomenological method, does not specify the particular content of these feeling determinations in specific cases, but is content to delineate what he finds to be the form of the mediation. It should be noted that, also consistent with his method, this form may be determined only in the analysis of particular mediations necessarily having a particular content. See, “Hegel-Freud.”
Darrel E. Christensen, “Some Implications for the Doctrine of God of Hegel’s Concept of Thought as Mediation” (a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Southern California, 1963), Chapter VII, “The Problem of the Relativity of Concepts of God” (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Microfilms, Inc., 65-9969). This work will hereafter be referred to as Thought as Mediation.
I have been momentarily unable to locate a passage in which Hegel, in discussing his method, refers to “the folding of the mind back upon itself.”
Exodus 3.
Exodus 3:14. In the account in its present form, which probably dates from the sixth century B. C., it is Eloheim who calls and Jahweh who sends.
Numbers 20:10-13.
See, “Hegel-Freud,” pp. 373f.
An important resource for this justification is Hegel’s treatment of the dialectic of Spirit, the third moment within his account of Absolute Religion. VPR, Vol. II, pp. 308-56, or LPR, Vol. III, pp. 100-51. While there is no direct counterpart to my usage of the term “contemporaneity,” the term does seem to capture the sense of his thought.
The problem of whether or in what sense God is personal for Hegel is treated in Thought as Mediation, pp. 182-6.
Die Philosophy des Geistes, p. 206.
If Hegel’s dialectic of the Idea is to be regarded as a logic, it must be noted that “dialectical logic” has little in common with traditional logic and concepts of contradiction appropriate to each must remain quite distinct. See the discussion of A. Schaff, Dialektyka marksistowska a zasada sprzecznosci, Mysl Filoz., 4 (1955) by Henryk Skolimowski, in “Analytical-Linguistic Marxism in Poland,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (April-June, 1965), pp. 235-248, especially p. 241.
See my treatment of Hegel on the Religion of Utility, this volume, pp. 000-00.
For an illustration of this characteristic one directional connotation of the term, see Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrise, und Andere Schriften aus der Heidelberger Zeit, mit einem Vorwort von Herman Glockner (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1927), Section 94, on the “false infinity.”
As McTaggart has carefully noted, the forms of thought per se are not in time, by which I think he must have meant to say that these forms transcend all particular times. That such exemplary mediations as I have considered would be regarded by Hegel as experienced in time, seems clear enough. The practical import of the fact that the mediation of time (history) and space (nature) is inclusive of most other mediations, being near the top of the hierarchy of the forms of thought, is that time is in the course of being mediated throughout the system. Hegel, because he was reflecting pre-evolutionary biological theory, however, did not follow out this implication of his methodology with consistency, but denied time to mediations of thought within nature (mediations below the level of the human understanding). J. Ellis McTaggert, “Time and the Hegelian Dialectic,” Mind, Vol. II, New Series (1893), pp. 490-504. Also see J. O. Wisdom, “Hegel’s Dialectic in Historical Philosophy,” Philosophy, Vol. 15 (1940), pp. 243-68.
This distinction between formal “validity” and truth is not maintained by Hegel with any degree of consistency, since this distinction like all others, must be contained (as least ideally and in principle) in the Truth that is the Notion. For a detailed consideration of this matter, see my treatment of it in Section VII of this volume, pp. 000-00.
Darrel E. Christensen, “Nelson and Hegel on the Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (September, 1964), pp. 58–63.
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1970 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Christensen, D.E. (1970). Introduction. In: Christensen, D.E. (eds) Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9152-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9152-4_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-8439-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-9152-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive