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This allows Hegel to link the histories of religion and art.
By contrast, art reaches its peak in Greece. The modern period is treated as a period of artistic decline.
Only in Greek art do message (or content) and medium (or form) coincide.
It is more personal, inward, ideally non-empirical.
Each particular artistic discipline is seen as having been characteristic or dominant at a particular point in the history of art.
Architecture sees its task as to work inorganic nature into a shape that becomes allied to the mind, an artistically valid “outside world”.
Thus language shows itself to be merely a vehicle and not constitutive of thought.
So, religion and art are destined to be superseded by philosophy which is able to dispense with the sensuous and to deal in purely conceptual terms.
In medieval times, religion and philosophy became independent of art. The inner depths of the Christian God and of Christian man elude full expression in art. Art loses the internal harmony which it displayed in Classical times, because it points to a meaning which art itself cannot fully express. It becomes allegory.
confess that theirs is an “art of exhaustion”.
But “system” also implies completeness and an “end”.
Marx, and in our own day, Fukuyama, have been tempted by the possibility that history itself might have an “end” (purpose and finality).
Religion keeps its important place in his mature philosophy as a way of apprehending and expressing the Absolute.
Absolute in pure speculative terms and is therefore able to synthesize all other forms of expression.
and conceives of his life as a triadic process,
who attempted to give geometrical expression to the mystical ideas
but they proved too static. His philosophy is a dynamic one which requires the idea of “imageless truth”.
mysticism of Reason.
the inspiration of the mystics.
religions are all part of one world history.
Religious consciousness has three main moments or phases. God is the “universal”, initially infinite and undifferentiated, associated with various forms of paganism and pantheism. The second moment is that in which I distinguish myself from God. The finite and the infinite appear disunited. My consciousness of God “outside” involves my consciousness of myself as separated or alienated from him as a sinner. The third moment is that of individuality — the return of the particular to the universal, the finite to the infinite. Separation and alienation are overcome. This is religion as an abstract
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They were intended to be controversial
The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.
I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling. — Schleiermacher
“panlogicism”.
The last instalment was suppressed by Prussian censorship and only circulated privately.
He is scathing about social conditions in England.
Hegel sees the self-interest of the new middle-class which has made reform serve its own coming to power.
“It is a crisis in which everything that was formerly valid appears to be made problematic”.
“This collision, this nodus, this problem is one whose solution history has to work out in the future.”
over questions of theology.
“Right” Hegelians defended traditional Christianity, at the same time assimilating what bits of the system they could.
“Centre” Hegelians sought to reinterpret religious dogma in Hegelian terms to give it a new, more scientific language.
“Left” Hegelians criticized Christianity and developed Hegel’s ideas towards radical (even atheistic) conclusions.
In the period 1843-6, all of the major theorists and journalistic publicists of the Left Hegelian movement engaged in divisive criticism of one another,
he wrote to Hegel about his efforts to “actualize and secularize the Idea”.
humankind in place of his Absolute Spirit.
Their aim was a final liberation from the illusions of Christian culture,
as well as from Hegel’s translation of that culture into the metaphysics of his system.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
exceptional historical sense underlying it.
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.
The problem was, Hegel had succeeded in persuading even his critics that his system contained all previous standpoints as subsidiary components of itself.
who questioned the role of philosophical reasoning itself and sought to replace it.
declared the bankruptcy of Reason.
“to expunge the dragon’s seed of Hegelian pantheism” from the minds of Prussian youth.
Schelling’s own mystical ideas failed to win many converts and attendance at his lectures was disappointing.
