According to Hegel, neither science nor thought nor reason itself, is possible without the mediating presence of the religious consciousness, which, he claimed, flowers most fully in the form of Christian revelation. Only this safeguards against the modern skepticism leading to a dead end of nothingness.
Hegel, as Andrew Cole showed, was primarily a medieval thinker, his dialectics from Plotinus and later developed by the scholastics, and primarily, Hegel’s own brand, worked out by Nicholas of Cusa.
Man is a liturgical being, no brain on a stick, his consciousness, as Marx says, is shaped by his acting in the world. During the liturgy identities are performed, bodily rhythms participate in the story of Christianity which engages the heart and imagination, incarnating moral habits and ways of being. Story and Myth itself can be as reasonable (proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having. The story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way) as any philosophy.
Indeed it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos, as Paul Tyson points out, Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.
Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts.
Hegel, as Andrew Cole showed, was primarily a medieval thinker, his dialectics from Plotinus and later developed by the scholastics, and primarily, Hegel’s own brand, worked out by Nicholas of Cusa.
Man is a liturgical being, no brain on a stick, his consciousness, as Marx says, is shaped by his acting in the world. During the liturgy identities are performed, bodily rhythms participate in the story of Christianity which engages the heart and imagination, incarnating moral habits and ways of being. Story and Myth itself can be as reasonable (proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having. The story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way) as any philosophy.
Indeed it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos, as Paul Tyson points out, Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.
Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts.
It is in this context that I offer some thoughts by Ryan Haecker, the upcoming Hegel scholar who's recently garnered a lot of buzz, HERE on why Hegel see’s Christianity as necessary for any philosophical thought or reason to begin with :
“Interpreters who wish to de-Christianize Hegelian philosophy may allege that the subordinate and mediating role of religion in the system of Hegel means that the Christian religion is suppressed by the superior concept of (C.DD) Absolute Knowing and (3.3.3) Philosophy: just as the universal concept purifies philosophy of the particular content of intuition, so does it seem to exorcise philosophical reason of religion. However, this interpretation confuses the Hegelian principle of subsumption (Aufhebung), which preserves the subordinate concepts, with bad skepticism, which suppresses and rejects the subordinate concepts. Hegel describes the difference between subsumption and skepticism in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit:
“For this view is skepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothingness, and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result… The skepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther, but must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is — in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen; and in the negation the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself.” (PhG §79)
Lest we fall into the most abysmal skepticism which cannot advance a step further, thinking must incorporate the determinate negations of all concepts to “progress through the complete succession of forms”: rather than being cast into the void, the Christian religion is denied merely as absolute knowledge just as it is preserved as a concept that is essential to this knowledge, viz. the negation of negation or the determinate negation (determinatio est negatio): the concept of Christianity is negated as containing the fullness of purely conceptual truth even while it is affirmed, viz. this negation, to be altogether necessary for the emergence of philosophical truth. In the (3.3) Absolute Idea of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, (3.3.2) Religion objectifies the varied aesthetic imaginings into a sacred drama of the self-revelation of the Absolute to consciousness.
The Christian religion is essential as the most synthetic and dynamic form of religion which, through divine revelation, uniquely allows consciousness to imagine and know philosophical science. If religious consciousness were, on the contrary, consigned to the abysmal void of unthought, then there could be no warranted claim to scientific knowledge. This problem of the doxastic foundations of science in religious belief continues to resurface in anti-realist and anti-foundationalist critiques of natural science and scientific naturalism, such as Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975), Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (1993), and Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos (2012). The necessity of the mediating concept of Religion in the philosophy of Hegel thus inverts the common understanding of the relation of faith and reason: faith is not the ghostly shadow of reason the necessary precondition of reason itself. So Hegel may affirm, with St. Anselm, that we must have faith seeking understanding (Credo ut Intellegam), and with the proverbs that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” (Pr. 9:10)
Feuerbach denied the subjectivity of the Absolute to be anything other than the subjectivity of man, and consequently re-centered the Absolute Idea into the mind of man rather than the mind of God. Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism rejected the Schellingian identity between the knowledge of the finite human Ego and the absolute divine Ego, the Berkeleyan subsistence of the universe in the perception of God, and the whole Platonic inheritance of preternatural transcendent forms.
The consequence was not only the rejection of the priority of the pure forms of logic to the extended matter of nature but the implicit denial of the very possibility of a science of true philosophy: absolute knowledge requires an absolute knower as the subject which knows the object of truth, just as the truth of the particulars is the universal in which they are altogether united.
The rejection of God, Platonic universals, and Logic from the metaphysics of Hegel, viz. the anthropocentric reduction, consequently makes true, universal and scientific knowledge impossible.
The consequence was not only the rejection of the priority of the pure forms of logic to the extended matter of nature but the implicit denial of the very possibility of a science of true philosophy: absolute knowledge requires an absolute knower as the subject which knows the object of truth, just as the truth of the particulars is the universal in which they are altogether united.
The rejection of God, Platonic universals, and Logic from the metaphysics of Hegel, viz. the anthropocentric reduction, consequently makes true, universal and scientific knowledge impossible.
The Absolute is the truth. To deny that there is truth is just as much to deny that this denial of truth is itself true, which is to affirm, viz. the Law of Excluded Middle, that this denial is false. Thus any denial of the truth self-contradictory. This is the problem of any anthropocentric reduction of absolute truth that relativizes truth to the human mind. Therefore, according to classical logic, Feuerbach cannot affirm an anthropocentrism or naturalism that excludes the Absolute, universals, and logic, without also contradicting himself.”
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