Argues that love plays an essential—if often implicit—role in Hegel's mature theory of moral subjectivity and political community.

_Critical essays on Hegel's views concerning the relationship between religion and politics._.

In his Logic, Hegel argues that evaluative judgments are comparisons between the reality of an individual object and the standard for that reality found in the object's own concept. Understood in this way, an object is bad insofar as it fails to be what it is according to its concept. In his recent Life and Action, Michael Thompson has suggested that we can understand various kinds of natural defect in a similar way, and that if we do, we can helpfully (...) see intellectual and moral badness—irrationality and vice—as themselves varieties of natural defect. In this paper, I argue that Hegel's position on animal individuality denies the claim that irrationality and vice are forms of natural defect. Hegel's account of the individuality proper to the animal organism in the Philosophy of Nature clearly disallows evaluative judgments about animals and thereby establishes a well-defined conceptual distinction between natural defect and intellectual or ethical—i.e., broadly spiritual or geistliche—defect. Hegel thus provides a way of maintaining the difference between nature and spirit within his broader commitment to a post-Kantian conception of substantial form. (shrink)

Transcendental materialism is a philosophical perspective that uses German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and natural science to offer a materialist account of subjectivity and culture. This essay compares this philosophical framework with recent work in the study of religion and philosophy of religion. While transcendental materialism has until now been unconcerned with religion, it offers parallels with this recent work. It differs, however, in its specific understanding of the material dimension of the dialectical relationship between abstraction/conceptuality and practice/embodiment.

In this dissertation I explore how Hegel conceives of the practice of religion. Religion for Hegel cannot be the relationship between humans and a transcendent being, since, as I argue, Hegel's God is not a being of the transcendent sort, but reason as Idea and spirit. Nor does Hegel primarily understand religion as feeling or immediate experience of the divine. According to Hegel, religion involves knowledge of the truth in the form of representation, and I discuss the truths that in (...) his view are common to all religions, as well as the principle that he thinks guides the development of the various determinate religions that culminate in Christianity. But, first and foremost, religion for Hegel is cultus or practice in which a person overcomes her own particularity in a radical manner and identifies completely with the universal, objective standpoint. By overcoming her particularity, the person recognizes that her own interests lack absolute value, and she is willing to abandon them entirely for the sake of what the universal requires of her. The highest form of the cultus for Hegel is full participation in Sittlichkeit, or the social and cultural life of modern Protestant Europe. In the cultus, a person achieves freedom, the goal of religion and the highest value in Hegel's philosophy. I argue that freedom for Hegel is independence vis-à-vis the world in both an active and a passive sense. As active, freedom is the autonomy that a person possesses when she acts rationally or follows the ethical norms that are a necessary moment of being free. As passive, freedom is the independence that a person gains when she is no longer attached to her particular interests and is accepting of circumstances in which her desires are not met. But for Hegel the norms of freedom also allow and require that a person continue to engage fully in the world and actively pursue her own particular interests, since such activities play a necessary role in being free. In my. (shrink)