Abstract

My commitment to a religious idealism that emphasizes struggle and tragedy, accepts liberationist criticism, and espouses democratic socialist politics shapes what I take from Hegel and Paul Tillich. Hegel is both alien to me and distinctly the thinker with whom I am never done. Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard scored against Hegel by emphasizing the situation of the knower, but both were one-sided compared to Hegel. Emmanuel Levinas scored against Hegel by railing against the constraints of ontology and upholding the priority of the ethical, but antiontology is still a form of ontology, mirroring what it repudiates, with no basis for claiming to know anything. Levinas repeated Kierkegaard's experience of mirroring...