Chapter 6 - Of Things Divine and Logical

Summary

Religion is for Hegel the language of a community about itself. Its practices and beliefs reflect the sense of self-identity that animates the community’s members, and, since that identity is a product of reason, they also reflect the level of explicit rationality the community has achieved. Religion, however, is not the same as rational knowledge. Evil, for Hegel, is not a cosmic event as it is for Schelling but a historical and eminently individual act – in effect, the product of reason doing violence to nature. Religion’s specific function is thus one of reconciliation, a function that assumes different forms depending on historical circumstances and the advent of self-aware rationality. Nonetheless, reconciling cannot be the same as understanding reconciliation. Chapter 6 contrasts religion in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It returns to the theme of feeling of Chapter 1, for feeling is an experience of identity. It also examines Hegel’s interpretation of the Christian story of incarnation and redemption as an imaginative portrayal of incarnate rationality. It then again returns to Chapter 1 by interpreting Hegel’s Logic, the science of this rationality, as an extension of Kant’s doctrine of the categories but without the classical metaphysical presuppositions still encumbering that latter.