Religion and Representation in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
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DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 11-2017 The perversion of the absolute: religion and representation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Thomas Floyd Wright DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Wright, Thomas Floyd, "The perversion of the absolute: religion and representation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit" (2017). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 240. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/240 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PERVERSION OF THE ABSOLUTE Religion and Representation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 BY Thomas Floyd Wright Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Hegel contra Theology . 1 1.2 Marx, Ante-Hegel . 5 1.3 Hegel, post Hegel mortum . 11 1.4 Speculation and perversion . 16 2 The perversion of identity 22 2.1 The evil of ontotheology . 22 2.2 The perversion of desire: Augustine . 26 2.3 The perversion of speech: Hobbes . 30 2.4 The perversion of reason: Kant . 35 2.5 Absolute non-identity . 45 3 Romanticism and the antinomy of morality 47 3.1 The law of feeling against the feeling of law . 47 3.2 The antinomy of identity: two views of religion in Hegel . 52 3.3 The antinomy of irony: Romanticism and the morality of feeling . 65 3.4 The heresy of feeling: Schleiermacher . 72 3.5 Representation and reconciliation . 81 4 The spirit of perversion 90 4.1 Religion and the speculative identity of feeling and thought . 90 4.2 The principle of perversion . 97 4.3 Religion as self-subjectification . 102 4.4 Representation and reproduction . 109 4.5 The good news of the death of God . 124 5 Perversion of the absolute 140 5.1 The end of religion . 140 5.2 The alienation of representation . 143 5.3 The recollection of representation . 147 5.4 Time as absolute illusion . 153 5.5 Spirit as absolute perversion . 158 6 Conclusion 162 6.1 The science of perversion . 162 Bibliography 171 1 Introduction Hegel contra Theology The aim of this study is to “recover a nonfoundational and radical Hegel,” to borrow critical theorist Gillian Rose’s description of her own work in Hegel contra Sociology.1 In a similar spirit, my primary ambition is to challenge the dominant view that the core of his thinking amounts to a defense of the status quo, whether in its more conservative or liberal dimensions, while affirming the claim—often denied—that this core is political. My focus here is on the status of religion. I argue that attempts by sympathetic interpretations to remove, obscure, or otherwise revise the close connection between religion and philosophy in Hegel’s system in order to make it more ac- commodating to contemporary, critical attitudes toward metaphysics actually achieve the opposite by emphasizing what is in fact this system’s most conservative moment: the distinction between feeling (associated with religious cognition) and understanding (associated with logical cognition) as separate, inchoate “forms” of genuinely rational cognition—what Hegel calls “Absolute Know- ing.” The latter, in which Hegel purports to comprehend the identity of the two forms, is viewed with near universal skepticism. In my view, this skepticism rests on a misguided tendency to sub- stitute what is essentially a Kantian transcendental concept of identity, in which the unity of the two terms can only be postulated but never itself comprehended, for Hegel’s own “speculative” no- tion of identity. In short, my claim is that this substitution is an obscure form of question-begging, 1. I am deeply indebted here not only to the model Rose offers for a genuinely critical reading of Hegel, but also several of its specific insights, including the significance of speculative identity in relation to the question of law, and thus the fundamentally political nature of the most basic problems of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981). 1 in which the controversial status of Hegel’s conclusion serves as the surreptitious justification for distorting or even rejecting his argument in favor of the position he explicitly criticizes, and fur- ther, rather than clarifying the relation of religion and philosophy in Hegel’s system, these attempts effectively conflate the two with the result that the validity of reason is guaranteed only by refer- ence to an external, postulated unity of being, and the legitimacy of faith always depends on the negative, abstract character of its values.2 Against this tendency, my guiding thesis is that it is impossible to discern the vital, critical impetus of Hegel’s system without fully appreciating the role of religion in it, as the level at which this transcendental identity is overcome. The exposition of this thesis consists in two interconnected tasks. The historical object is to outline and trace the influence of a transcendental concept of identity in interpretations of religion in and—in the case of the Romantics—against Hegel’s system, and develop an alternate concept explicitly and fully distinguished from Kant’s. On this point it is committed to a somewhat opin- ionated interpretation of Kant’s system. Namely, it locates a concept of identity at the transcen- dental hypothesis—that metaphysical truth neither has nor needs access to “real necessity”—in his account of the synthesis of representations (Vorstellungen3) in cognition. In sensation, or “outer sense,” the conjunction of two representations—the light of the sun and the warmth of a stone—is encountered as a fact, and this corresponds, in feeling, or “inner sense,” to the fact of a strong conviction of their necessary connection. But, as Hume had persuaded Kant, there is no relation between these facts itself perceptible by thought. To the extent we want to maintain the idea of some identity between them, it would have to be conceived as something transcendental—an ide- ally rather than really necessary connection. As a result, reason can only legitimately inquire about the subjective necessity of the feeling, leaving aside the question of what heretofore would have been called its “truth.” In other words, critique shifts attention to the formal justification of the 2. In other words, such interpretations save Hegel for modernity by making him conform to what Nietzsche iden- tified as modernity’s nihilistic core: the simultaneous knowledge of its own emptiness and fanatical defense of this emptiness as the highest “value”—not just the death of God but the elevation of death to something divine. 3. Kant also uses the term Darstellung in a related but arguably distinct fashion. Here, we will only be concerned with the more common, ordinary concept of Vortstellung, which translated the English word “idea” such as it is used in Locke and others. 2 claims of cognition (quid iuris), away from their factual basis (quid facti).4 As Rose observes, this idea forms the basis in the early twentieth-century pursuit of a empirico-scientific study of society, now entirely freed from any metaphysical necessity, which is replaced with “moral” or “social ne- cessity.” In order to define this new concept of necessity, sociology reduces the relation between subjective data and objective data to just one of its terms, with the other relegated to the status of epiphenomena.5 Rose compellingly argues that the debate this fueled foundered in antinomical opposition according to a logic Kant himself identified, and the resulting methodological ambi- guity has obscured the “philosophical foundations of Marxism” precisely insofar as it also “bars access to Hegel” (i.e., dialectical reason).6 This is also true, in Rose’s view, of Marx’s successors in Critical Theory, who continue to grapple with the relation between theory and practice. She demonstrates that efforts to overcome this problem have failed primarily because they remained within the horizon of a fundamental “neo-Kantian paradigm,” the problems of which are uniquely overcome by Hegel’s phenomenological method. The question I pursue here, building on Rose’s account, is both how and why post-Marxist philosophers miss this dimension of Hegel’s thinking. I trace this to a hegemonic consensus about his philosophical theology—namely, that a Kantian transcendental identity was required to make any sense of it. I argue that, as a result, the same fundamental antinomy that has afflicted sociological accounts of reason have skewed interpretations of Hegel’s own work. We see this most clearly in Hegel’s phenomenology of religion in the penultimate chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is where he develops his own account of representation, one that culminates his entire analysis of spirit, and therefore has crucial systematic implications. The function of this chapter, and religion in Hegel’s thought generally, has overwhelmingly been interpreted in light of the assumption that religion and philosophy are separate “forms” of thought, even if they nonetheless share the same content. According to this common view, Christian theology explicates the same “absolute”—viz. 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998), A84/B116. The idea of a “transcendental identity” is not one introduced by Kant, but I use it here anticipating the point at which something like it becomes unavoidable in his moral philosophy.