Cover Title : Essays in Hegelian Dialectic a Rose Hill Book Author

test cover title : Essays in Hegelian Dialectic A Rose Hill Book author : Lauer, Quentin. publisher : Fordham University Press isbn10 | asin : 0823210219 print isbn13 : 9780823210213 ebook isbn13 : 9780585195414 language : English subject Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,--1770-1831--Addresses, essays, lectures. publication date : 1977 lcc : B2948.L33eb ddc : 193 subject : Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,--1770-1831--Addresses, essays, lectures. page_iii Page iii Essays in Hegelian Dialectic QUENTIN LAUER, S.J. New York FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS 1977 page_iv Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will repres- ent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. © Copyright 1977 by FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved. LC 76-18465 ISBN 0-8232-1021-9 (clothbound) ISBN 0-8232-1022-7 (paperback) Printed in the United States of America page_v Page v Contents Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 1 The Phenomenon of Reason 17 2 Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl 39 3 Harris' Hegel's Development: A Review 61 4 Hegel as Historian of History 67 5 Human Autonomy and Religious Affirmation in Hegel 89 6 Fackenheim's Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought: A Review 107 7 Hegel on Proofs for God's Existence 113 8 Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theology 137 9 Hegel on the Identity of Content in Religion and Philosophy 153 10 Philosophy and Social Change 169 11 Authority in the Contemporary World 191 page_vii Page vii Abbreviations In-text and footnote references to the works of Hegel are indicated as follows: BDG Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Himmel- heber, 1966). BS Berliner Schriften, 1818-1831, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956). "Diff." "Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie," Jenaer krit- ische Schriften, edd. Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968). EGP Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Mein- er, 1940). EPW Enzyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, edd. Friedhelm Nicolin and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959). GP Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hermann Glockner, 3 vols., Sämtliche Werke XVII-XIX (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1928). GW Glauben und Wissen, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Himmelheber, 1962). JL Jenenser Logik, Metaphysik, und Naturphilosophie, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967). PG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Hermann Glockner, Sämtliche Werke XI (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1928). Phän. Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952). PR Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. Hermann Glockner, 2 vols., Sämtliche Werke XV-XVI (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1928). SP System der Philosophie, ed. Hermann Glockner, 3 vols., Sämtliche Werke VIII-X (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1929). TJ Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. Hermann Nohl (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966). WL Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963). page_1 Page 1 Introduction At the very beginning of an enterprise such as the present one a rather simple (but seri- ous) question must be asked: Is the author justified in digging up a series of studies which have issued from his pen over the past twelve years and collecting them within the covers of one book? The question is not whether it is worthwhile to publish one more book even one more collection of essays on Hegel. A look at the rapidly growing list of books which the thought of Hegel has called forth in recent years would seem to answer the latter question ad- equately. What has to be justified is giving to this collection of articles a unity they do not of themselves possess by simply putting them together in this way. Each was, after all, written independently of the others, and each was intended to stand on its own feet. Many of them do, of course, complement each other, as the numerous cross references from one to another will indicate, but of itself that does not answer the question. When one writes of Hegel, whose own thought is so systematically unified that every aspect of it implies every other aspect of it, one inevitably multiplies such cross references. But perhaps the answer to the question is contained right there: Hegel himself provides the unity which justifies gathering together what can seem to be disparate attempts to come to terms with one or another aspect of his thought. No one more than Hegel, it can safely be said, has made more gigantic efforts to bring all being and all thought into a unity. To put it negatively: no one saw more clearly than Hegel the futility of fragmentation, of disconnectedness, whether it be the political fragmentation of a Europe which Napoleon had vainly sought to unify by force, the cultural fragmentation of an intellectual community caught in the grip of Romantic individualism, the social fragmentation of a civil society whose members were becoming alienated from each other through the fierce competitive activity of production, the moral and religious fragmentation of a mob scene of sheer selfishness, or the intellectual fragmentation of a world dominated by the power of scientific abstraction. The entire Hegelian endeavor was dedicated to the task of reintegrating the dismembered world in which Hegel found himself. Yet he did not see his mission as that of the activist crusader who would change the world by revolutionary activity. Nor could he be satisfied with simply ensconcing himself in the ivory tower of abstract thought and criticizing the world as it passed beneath him. As he saw it, his task was, rather, that of educating his people and page_2 Page 2 through them, he would hope, the whole of humanity to the existential vocation of realizing a humanity which would be thoroughgoingly human, which is to say, thoroughly rational in the best sense of that term. That he should see this task as specifically a philosophical one was due to his conviction, first, that what is most characteristically human is rational thought and, secondly, that human thought is most supremely rational when it occupies itself with thought, with what thought reveals regarding man. This last is important enough to bear emphasis. Hegel was interested in thought, not because its investigation constituted the most interesting of all intellectual games, but because it threw light on that most significant of beings, man. If he could bring man to a consciousness of all that it is to be human, his philosophical task would be accomplished and the world would be a better place for man to live in. It may, of course, be considered naïvely utopian to believe that if men think rationally they will live rationally, but that may not be too wide of the mark; it is certainly not irrational to say that the failure to live rationally is a sign that men fail to think rationally not to live rationally is to be irrational. In any event, it was Hegel's conviction that philosophy's task is to grasp in thought (begreifen) the structure of rationality (Begriff) and that by being in service to philosophy the philosopher is in service to humanity. The System Phenomenology. In a very significant sense, then, Hegel's whole philosophy which he considers not to be his philosophy but simply philosophy systematizing itself is in all its com- plexity essentially a philosophy of man, of the essential spirituality of the characteristically human. The problems to which this philosophy addresses itself are the perennial problems of human thought; nor are the problems and their solutions separable from each other. The first question philosophy has to answer regards itself: Just what is philosophical thinking? Is it con- jectural, emotional, intuitive; or is it scientific, in the sense that it is knowing in the strictest and fullest sense of that term? If philosophy is to be scientific, are we to determine antecedently what "scientific" means and then see to it that philosophy confine itself within the limitations of what can possibly be scientific; or are we to allow human consciousness to show us what it itself is by developing one after the other all the implications of being conscious at all until we see that it cannot stop short of an absolute subject knowing an absolute object? The answers to these questions Hegel attempts to give us in his Phenomenology of Spirit, which in one sense is the introduction to the System, unfolding as it does the very possibility of there being a system. In another sense it is the constant underpinning of the System, page_3 Page 3 since the unfolding of the total interconnectedness of all thought and all being is already contained in the process whereby merely objective consciousness develops into that thoroughly rational self-consciousness wherein an absolute subject which can only be spirit grasps comprehensively an absolute object which can only be Spirit. Logic. The next question to be asked concerns what thought thinks. It would, of course, be simply out of the question that any philosophy or philosophy itself could provide us with a catalogue of all that human thinking thinks or can think, knows or can know. It is not out of the question, however, that in thinking itself thought could elaborate the framework within which all that can be thought fits. It is this which Aristotle sought to do from the point of view of thinking in his Organon and from the point of view of what is thought in his Metaphysics.

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