The following are extracts (for review purposes) from a chapter, Hegel's Dialectic (in Book IV: The Philosophical Eschatology of Europe) from Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes, translated by David Ratmoko, 2009 (originally published in German in 1947):
Book IV: The Philosophical Eschatology of Europe
Hegel's Dialectic
"[Immanuel] Kant [(1724–1804)] is the Old Testament and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel [(1770–1831)] the New Testament of German Idealism. That is how the young Hegel himself understood his relationship with Kant, whose law of duty he equated with the law of the Old Testament. Hegel seeks to derive his own system strictly from the New Testament, particularly from the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and St John's Gospel. The foundations of Hegel's doctrine are still openly visible in the fragments of his...Early Theological Writings..., which...are fundamental to understanding all of the later works of Hegel, as well as to grasping his central theme of the dialectic[.]" – p. 149
"Kant regards the shalt of the law not as 'an order given by an external agency' but as a 'consequence of one's own understanding,' 'as respect for duty[.]'...Kant turns against mere legality by showing that 'the legal is universal and the force of its obligation resides within this universality[.]' (note 144)...[However, since] the command of duty is universal, which remains opposed to the particular,...the latter is the oppressed when the former reigns....The man of the command and the man of duty are both slaves, the only difference being that the former carries his lord outside himself and the latter within himself. Kant's morality is in effect still legality, for the Kantian ought is not sublated [(removed or denied)] in [our] being....
"But Jesus, who overcomes the law with love, moves beyond Kantian morality. 'Against complete subservience to the law of an alien Lord, Jesus opposes not a partial subjugation to a law of one's own, the self-coercion of Kantian virtue, but rather virtues without lordship and without submission, that is, modifications of love.' (note 146)...
"This spirit of Jesus, a spirit raised above morality, is present in the Sermon on the Mount, which is an attempt elaborated in several examples 'to strip the laws of legality, of their legal form. It does not teach respect for the laws; rather, it exhibits that which fulfils the law and annuls it as a law, and thus is something higher than obedience to the law and makes the law superfluous. Since the commands of duty presuppose a separation (between reason and inclination) and since the dominance of the concept declares itself in a thou shalt, that which is raised above this separation is by contrast an is..., a modification of life.' (note 148)
" '[I]n love all thought of duties vanishes.' (note 149)
"Love, seen as an ideal which no human being can attain, is turned upside down, 'for such an ideal in which duties are represented as willingly done, is self-contradictory since duties require an opposition, and an action which we like to do requires none.' (note 150)
"In love there is 'unity between inclination and the law, in which the latter loses its form as law.' (note 151) The correspondence between inclination and the law is 'the pleroma (fulfillment) of the law,' a state in which there is a synthesis of the subject and object, in which the subject and object have lost their opposition to one another: 'A synthesis in which the law (which Kant calls objective for that reason) loses its universality and the subject its particularity—so both lose their opposition to one another.' (note 152) The opposition between duty and inclination becomes unity in the modifications of love....
"[T]he young Hegel['s] metaphysics of love...reveals the modifications of love. All forms of separation, all constraints on relationships, have disappeared in the true nature of love. True being exists in love alone because 'union and being are synonymous.' (note 154)...
" 'Of course love cannot be commanded; of course it is pathological [in the sense of pathos], an inclination—but this does not detract from its greatness. It does not degrade love that its essence does not dominate something alien to it....But this does not mean that it is something subordinate to duty and right; on the contrary, it is rather love's triumph that it lords over nothing, is without any hostile power over another. Love has conquered does not mean the same as duty has conquered, i.e. subdued its enemies; it means that love has overcome hostility.' (note 155)
"Whereas duty, by setting boundaries beyond itself, always leaves an objective law intact, the power of this objectivity is broken by love because it is boundless. Love is the 'union of the spirit and the divine; to love God is to feel one's self in the all of life with no external restrictions in the infinite.' (note 156)" – pp. 149–51
"[T]he outline of the Hegelian dialectic...drives toward the negation of opposition in unification, which in turn is only possible in the complete surrender of love. The rhythm of the dialectic, which is learned from life, is steeped in the mystery of love: 'Love acquires this wealth of life in the exchange of every thought, every kind of manifold inner experience, for it seeks out differences and devises unifications ad infinitum; it turns to the full variety of nature in order to drink love out of every life.' (note 167) Once this synthesis is achieved, that which has been united cannot again become separate[.]" – pp. 153–4
"In the twelfth fragment, which presents the fundamental structure of the...Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate..., Hegel uses St John's Gospel and sayings from the Sermon on the Mount to develop the principle of dialectic, which is not to negate the object but to reconcile...it. The reconciliation of fate through love is the theme of the work which Hegel encapsulates in draft form: 'The forgiveness of sins is not the cancellation of punishment (because every punishment is...something objective, which cannot be annulled). It is not the removal of a bad conscience, because a deed cannot become undone; rather, it is the reconciliation of fate by love.' (note 171) Hegel's love is opposed to Kant's morality: 'A return to morality does not cancel sins and their punishment, fate; the deed remains. On the contrary it becomes even more irksome; the more morality there is, the more deeply the immorality of it is felt. Punishment, its fate, is not removed because morality is still opposed by an objective force.' (note 172) Love is the blossom of life and, in its widest sense, 'the Kingdom of God, the whole tree with all essential modifications and stages of development.' (note 173) Hegel's world is thus completely contracted into the mystery of love, and the dialectic of the entire process is summarized in the truth of love.
"The substance of love, moreover, is God, and so religion can be described as the self-consciousness of God: 'Religion and love are one. The beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with our being; we only see ourselves in him—and yet[,] there again[,] he is not us—a miracle, which we are unable to fathom.' (note 174)...'Love can only exist in response to its equivalent, in response to the mirror image, the echo of our being.' (note 175) 'God is love, love is God; there is no other godhead than love—only that which is ungodly, without love, must contain God in its idea, outside itself.' (note 176) In this way love is perfected in the revelation of life and always ahead [of] the revelation of God, as described in all its modifications by Hegel in his works. All of Hegel's system is fundamentally the philosophy of religion, the depiction of the self-revelation of God.
"The dialectic, which uncovers the seal of love in the essence of life, bears the sign of the spirit as an indelible watermark....'When...man...equates infinite life with the spirit of the whole outside himself, because he is limited, and at the same time sets himself apart from himself, the limited one, thus raising himself to life and reaching the most intimate union with it, then he is worshipping God.' (note 178)" – pp. 154–6
144 – Hegel, 1907, p. 265. [Hegel, 1996, p. 211.—Trans.]
146 – Ibid., p. 293.
148 – Ibid., p. 266. [Hegel, 1996, p. 212. (trans. modified).—Trans.]
149 – Ibid., p. 267. [Ibid.—Trans.]
150 – Ibid. [Ibid. p. 213.—Trans.]
151 – Ibid., p. 268. [Ibid. p. 214.—Trans.]
152 – Ibid.
154 – Ibid., p. 383.
155 – Ibid., p. 295 ff. [Hegel, 1996, p. 247.—Trans.]
156 – Ibid.
167 – Ibid., p. 380. [Hegel, 1996, p. 307.—Trans.]
171 – Ibid., p. 393.
172 – Ibid.
173 – Ibid., p. 394.
174 – Ibid., p. 396.
175 – Ibid.
176 – Ibid., p. 391.
178 – Ibid., p. 347.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Theologische Jugendschriften. Ed. Herman Nohl. Tübingen, 1907.
———. Early Theological Writings. Trans. T.M. Knox. Philadelphia, 1996.
Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.
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