Jaeschke Speculative and Anthropological Criticism of Religion a Theological Orientation to Hegel...

American Academy of Religion

Speculative and Anthropological Criticism of Religion: A Theological Orientation to Hegel andFeuerbachAuthor(s): Walter JaeschkeReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 345-364Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1462865 .

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The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLVIII/3

Speculative and Anthropological Criticism of Religion:

A Theological Orientation

to Hegel and Feuerbach

Walter Jaeschke

ABSTRACT

In Feuerbach's estimation, Hegelian philosophy had provided the "last place of refuge" for theology. Furthermore, he believed that his own philosophy had destroyed that refuge. Feuerbach accepted the Hegelian view of the history of philosophy as an irreversible process in which a particular philosophical position obtains its legitimation by sublating the immanent contradictions of the position previous to it. Thus, he saw the validation for his own concept of religion as coming not from an immediate analysis of the phenomena in question, but from that concept's negation of the Hegelian position.

But Feuerbach's position does not in fact arise out of a dialectical overcoming of Hegel's concept of religion. It is, rather, a pure "heterothesis" and, therefore, does not prove the necessity of an immanent philosophical-historical progression from a speculative to an anthropological concept of religion. The author suggests that if we wish to attribute argumentative power to the model of a philosophico-historical progression, then it is more correct to assert an immanent progression from an anthropological to a speculative concept of religion. Indeed, this is the direction in which Hegel's understanding of religion moved. In his earlier thinking, Hegel understood religion in terms that foreshadow Feuerbach's position. But Hegel was able to take up religion on a metaphysical level as well and, thereby, to sublate the anthropological concept of religion in the speculative. Thus, the question in dispute between Hegel and Feuerbach is this: Can one go beyond the anthropological standpoint to a speculative one, or does such a move simply force one beyond the already correctly overcome religious alienation of the self and establish a new and more sophisticated form of alienation?

After a discussion of the critical and the apologetic dimensions of Hegel's speculative concept of religion, the article examines the validity of Feuerbach's arguments against that concept. The author concludes



346 Walter Jaeschke

that, whatever the power of Feuerbach's attack upon a notion of religion built on a subject-object relation and a subject-predicate structure, his critique has little force against the speculative concept of religion.

I

" egelian philosophy is the last place of refuge, the last rational support for theology. As once Catholic theologians became de facto Aristotelians in order to fight Protestantism, so must Protestant

theologians now become de jure Hegelians in order to fight 'atheism'" (Feuerbach, 3:238).

This advice given by Feuerbach in his Provisional Theses (1843) was followed at that time by only a few theologians. Today even in Catholic theology there are those who claim that Hegel could signify for our age what Thomas Aquinas was to the church in the Middle Ages, though these continue to constitute a dwindling minority. On the other hand, however, theology has long since abandoned those diatribes which, practically speaking, formed an opinio communis, a generalized attitude, toward Feuerbach's work. This raving attitude toward Feuerbach was most prevalent where theologians showed no inkling of Feuerbach's own origin in German Idealist philosophy. Even today theologians have surely not become full-fledged followers of Feuerbach. Nevertheless, we see increasing indications that currently, due to a willingness to dialogue with Feuerbach, there are developing the beginnings of a productive theological appropriation of his thought. This has even reached the point of cautiously accepting Feuerbach's projectionist theory as a phenomen- ologically suitable analysis of faith (H.-M. Barth). No longer is Feuer- bach classed, as he was by the earlier Karl Barth, merely as one of the Assyrians or Babylonians whom God occasionally needed in order to call Jerusalem to order (K. Barth:207). Today he is rather considered like one of the prophets, whose words, of course, were not always valued; but lack of esteem in no way prejudices the truth of a prophetic word.

Both the productive appropriation and the rejection of Feuerbach's

Walter Jaeschke, who since 1974 has been connected with the Hegel archives at the Ruhr-University at Bochum, Germany, studied philosophy under Dieter Henrich and theology under Carsten Colpe and Helmut Gollwitzer at the Free University of Berlin, taking his doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation entitled Die Suche nach den eschatologischen Wurzeln der Geschichtsphilosophie (Munich, 1976). He is editor of the Science of Logic in the new edition of Hegel's works and is at work on a monograph concerning Hegel's philosophy of religion. At the meeting of the AAR in New York in 1979, he presented to the Nineteenth- Century Theology Group a paper, "Hegel's Philosophy of Religion: The Quest for a Critical Edition," which appeared in The Owl of Minerva.



Hegel and Feuerbach 347

In this regard, one can cite as paradigmatic the conclusion John Glasse draws in his comparison of Karl Barth's earlier and later positions: "From derision in the name of human evil and death, then, Barth has turned to pity in the name of the divine liberation of man to eternal life" (91). It is not necessary to accept Nietzsche's analysis of Christian compassion in order to acknowledge that such "compassion" or "sympa- thy" constitutes a conceptually weak argument-especially in a scientific discussion, which is the only kind in question within philosophy.

It would then appear consistent that theology in its present, thoroughly critical situation would pursue several strategies of argumentation and immunization, but leave out only the one Feuerbach had called the nearest at hand: the retreat to Hegelian speculation. For though this avenue might have appeared open to theology before Feuerbach, it seems to have been closed by his critique. So the quotation from Feuerbach at the beginning of this article had not exhaustively formulated his position. Contrary to how it might at first have appeared, Feuerbach certainly did not believe that atheism could be resisted on the basis of Hegelian speculation. He did not understand the relationship of his philosophy to Hegelian speculation the way Johann Gottlieb Fichte had once described the opposition between dogmatism and criticism. Fichte held that neither of the two could refute the other scientifically and that the choice of one or the other depended upon what type of person one was (195). Rather, Feuerbach claimed to have resolved the immanent contradictions in Hegel's speculative interpretation of Christianity, to have refuted theology in principle and not merely from the standpoint of theology itself, as Hegel did (3:267).

Feuerbach's conviction that he had irrevocably gone beyond Hegel is widely accepted even today. However, the very schema of a philosophico-historical falsification by which Feuerbach legitimated his critique of Christianity is itself recognizably Hegelian. It presumes a view of the history of philosophy as an irreversible process progressing in rigorous scientific continuity. Within this process each philosophical position respectively obtains its legitimation by itself, presenting the sublation of the immanent contradictions of the position previous to it. Hegel had grounded the truth of his philosophy in the sublating (Aufheben) of the contradictions found in systems previous to his own. He claimed to have taken up such systems' moments of truth into his own system. Similarly, Feuerbach linked the validity of his attempt to the negation of Hegel's. In fact, he made this linkage so close that he did not see the sources of the evidence for his own standpoint in an immediate analysis of the explicitly treated phenomena and especially that of religious consciousness. Rather, he located the evidence for the validity of his thought in the successful negation of Hegel's philosophy alone. For Feuerbach, the identification of the alienated essence of the human with the human "can be deduced not in a positive way, but only out of the Hegelian philosophy and as the negation of that philosophy.



348 Walter Jaeschke

This identification can only be grasped at all, can only be understood, if it is grasped as the total negation of speculative philosophy" (3:227).

This sentence, taken from the Provisional Theses, witnesses not only to Feuerbach's adequate awareness of his own dependence on Hegel. It equally defines the conditions under which alone Feuerbach's position can be criticized.

Since the present situation is still unconsciously determined by the image of an irresistible philosophico-historical progression, it might appear inopportune not to treat of the theme "Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians" or especially "Feuerbach and Marx." But for once we should be able to ask, from the point of view of Hegel's philosophy, whether Feuerbach is justified according to his own criterion of truth. We can ask what the consequences of such an approach might amount to for a theological orientation to Hegel. Such a critique of Feuerbach is, however, not an external one. If we take the quotation cited above seriously, that is, if we understand it as a methodological directive, this critique is indeed the only legitimate and fruitful one.

II

Several of the arguments against Hegel's speculative philosophy of religion are already found in Feuerbach's shorter writings from around the end of the 1830s, that is, before his formal break with Hegel in 1839. In 1838, during the course of the discussion about David Friedrich Strauss's Leben Jesu, Feuerbach saw it necessary to defend Hegel's philosophy of religion against an attack by Heinrich Leo. Leo was an earlier Hegelian who went over to Hengstenberg's neoorthodoxy and to the political restoration party connected with it. Feuerbach had originally drafted the small, very important writing On Philosophy and Christianity (2:261-330) as a review of Leo's written indictment of Hegel. It gives particulars concerning the already existing differences in Hegel's and Feuerbach's concepts of religion. Feuerbach rejected the accusation that Hegel's thought was not Christian, first of all by reference to the difference of dimension between religion and philosophy of religion. The latter was seen as the philosophical comprehension of the truth of religion. Philosophy grasps Christianity, but is not itself Christian. However, Hegel's theologically orthodox and politically reactionary opponents contested the right to make such a distinction. On the contrary, their demand for a Christian philosophy destroyed such a differentiation. Either one had to teach Christian philosophy, or one did not belong as professor of philosophy at a state university.

Over against this restorative demand, Feuerbach made use of an argument quite untypical for a Hegelian: he asserted the radical difference between philosophy and religion. Philosophy was assigned the area of reason, whereas religion was assigned the area of feeling and heart. This division, which was expressed here for the first time in all its sharpness, remained fundamental in Feuerbach's later writings.




On the basis of such a division it was possible for Feuerbach, over against the ideologues of the Christian restoration, to free philosophy of its subordination. This he did, however, only at the price of giving up the fundamental theorem of the speculative philosophy of religion: the identity of content between philosophy and religion.

Feuerbach's apology for the Hegelian philosophy of religion was successful in turning back the accusation that Hegel's philosophy of religion was not Christian. But it did this only by placing the philosophy already under attack further in the wrong. It allowed for a sharper criticism than had the original accusation. For Feuerbach the problem with Hegel's concept of religion was not that some of its consequences appear unacceptable. Rather, Hegel's estimate of the identity of philosophy and religion was in principle wrong. Feuerbach had then indeed confirmed the accusation of the non-Christian character of Hegel's philosophy. He nevertheless maintained the necessity of the incrimina- ting material while pulling the rug out from under the accusation itself. This strategy of argumentation differs in principle from the attempts of others, both right- and left-wing students of Hegel's, to prove the reconcilability of Hegel's philosophy of religion with Christianity.

Feuerbach's assertion of a total difference between philosophy and religion required further anchoring to be capable of fulfilling its purpose in the then sharp controversy over the Christian character of Hegel's philosophy. Feuerbach's designating separate areas for religion and philosophy should have been more acceptable to neoorthodoxy than the Hegelian theorem that religion and philosophy contain the same content only in differing form. However, already then it was not in Feuerbach's interest to establish a peaceful coexistence between religion and philosophy. He eliminated the possibility of any such peaceful coexistence by positing the necessarily anti-Christian character of contemporary Christi- anity. Feuerbach could ground this overall assertion only -again in glaring opposition to Hegel-by working with a totally unhistorical concept of Christianity. He identified Christianity with "earliest Christi- anity" and of course then concluded to the necessarily anti-Christian character of the modern world in all its forms: state, science, business, and so forth.

Especially in the small but important writing, On the Evaluation of the Writing: "The Essence of Christianity," one year after the publication of this major work, Feuerbach repeated the earlier accusation that Hegel (in opposition to Schleiermacher!) had not at all understood the essence of religion. Hegel had located the essence of religion in thought instead of in heart and feeling. Without doubt, Feuerbach's concept of religion is not to be thought of independently of Schleiermacher (Schott: 145-63). However, Feuerbach's concept of religion cannot be considered an immanent destruction of the speculative concept of religion. It rather draws out the consequence of a thoroughly questionable definition of religion found in the preface to The Essence of Christianity. As



350 Walter Jaeschke

with Hegel, so Feuerbach here sees the specific difference of religion from philosophy in the form in which both thematize their object. In following through, however, Feuerbach took up only the specific difference and lost from view the genus proximum, the second moment pertaining to the definition. He therefore first methodically abstracted from the philosophical dimension of religion and then did not again return to it, so that the principal difference between the two followed naturally enough. As Howard L. Williams has recently stressed (136-56), however, this philosophical dimension is the only one Hegel thematized, since it is indeed the only one which can form the object of a philosophy of religion.

In contradiction to Feuerbach's claim, his concept of religion does not rest on a theoretical overcoming of the Hegelian concept of religion. But it also does not depend only upon his controversy with the ideologues of the Christian restoration. Already in his Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830) Feuerbach spoke roughly of the opposition between religion and philosophy; and even earlier, in the 1828 letter with which he sent his dissertation to Hegel, he had shown his shifting attitude toward the question by the challenge "to truly destroy [Christi- anity], to bore it into the ground of truth" (1:356), and to grant to philosophy Christianity's place in the spiritual life of the age. Finally, if we trust the autobiographical sketch of 1846, already back in 1824 Feuerbach had gone "in a highly divided, unhappy, indecisive condition" to Berlin in order to study with Hegel. Already then Feuerbach had questioned "the combat between philosophy and theology, the necessity that one must either sacrifice philosophy to theology or theology to philosophy" (Bolin:12-13). Feuerbach at no time accepted the speculative concept of religion, not even before his formal break with Hegel. His concept of religion had not, as he proposed, arisen out of a dialectical overcoming of Hegel's position; it has to be considered rather as a pure "heterothesis," as a different thesis, which, however, is not the result of an immanent dialectical sublation of previous contradictions. The roots of his concept can be traced back even to Feuerbach's early years. His criterion was that his philosophy could be made comprehensible only out of the negation of the Hegelian. At least for the historico-genetic posing of the question, to which Feuerbach himself gave great weight, this self-appointed criterion is not verified. The necessity of a philosophico-historical immanent progressing from a speculative to an anthropological concept of religion is therewith in no way proved. That which in his specific argument against the speculative concept of religion might be able to convince will be discussed in what follows.




III

If we want to attribute argumentative power to the model of a philosophico-historical progression, it is more correct to assert an immanent progression from an anthropological to a speculative concept of religion. The justification for such a movement has until now been satisfactorily researched neither in connection with the conflict surrounding Feuerbach's position nor in any other context. Hegel's transition from his earlier efforts, which he made both in Tiibingen and at the beginning of his time in Bern (1792-94), to the speculative concept of religion, which is present since the later Jena years, constitutes precisely such a development from the anthropological to the speculative. As a student in Tiibingen, Hegel designated feeling, heart, and imagination as the locus of religion. This concept of religion stands in contrast to the orthodox understanding of religion as a relationship of the human to God, a relationship established through God's revelation. However, it was the Enlightenment's moral concept of God and religion which formed the primary opponent. While some traces of this concept of religion recall either Rousseau or Hoelderlin, other tendencies can be read as foreshadowing Feuerbach's projectionist thesis; for example, Hegel's assertion that "it has been reserved in the main for our epoch to vindicate, at least in theory, the human ownership of the treasures formerly squandered on heaven" (1971:159). In these years, Hegel treated religion only within the confines of an analysis of humankind's needs. Even in 1800, in his last letter from Frankfurt, Hegel asserted the same. In looking back he said that his scientific construction had begun from the subordinated needs of humanity and only now established itself as a system (Hoffmeister:59). At the end of the Frankfurt period, we find Hegel's insight that recourse to a myth-constructing imagination of humankind would by itself not be sufficient to understand the phenomenon of religion. As Feuerbach, so too Hegel is convinced "that there lies in human nature itself the need both to acknowledge a being higher than the human activity in our consciousness and to make the intuition of this being's fullness the vivifying center of life." Hegel, however, is equally convinced that "an examina- tion of this question cannot be thoughtfully and thoroughly pursued without becoming in the end a metaphysical treatment of the relation between the finite and the infinite" (1971:176).

Hegel was able to work out this position only after his transfer to Jena, after the discovery of the possibility of a rational knowledge of the Absolute in speculative philosophy. The result of this metaphysical analysis of religion gave rise to the insight that the structure of religion is the structure of self-consciousness, therewith the structure of reason and finally of Spirit itself.



352 Walter Jaeschke

From this result of the metaphysical treatment of religion there followed, however, not the total throwing away of the anthropological way of proceeding. The metaphysical discussion constitutes, so to speak, a new, deeper dimension. In addition to the metaphysical treatment of religion, we can also find in Hegel's unpublished manuscripts from this time remarks in which Feuerbach could have seen his task fulfilled: the task of identifying God unambiguously with the essence of the species. For Hegel, ancient religion is the product of the spirit of the people (Volksgeist). Christianity bursts the bounds of this Volksgeist religion. However, it does this not because it is revealed by God, but because its content is the very fate of humanity. In a certain conscious contrast to the interpretation of antiquity in Schiller's famous poem The Gods of Greece, Hegel sees the anthropological character of religion manifesting itself more clearly in Christianity than in the Greek forms of the gods. Jesus is the national god of the human race because he is the representative of the species: the individual human form of Jesus "expressed in its history the whole history of the empirical reality of the human species"; "the history of God is the history of the whole race, and each individual traverses this whole history of the race" (Rosenkranz:137,138). So far Hegel and Feuerbach are in wide-ranging agreement.

The question of the difference between these two thinkers arises first because for Hegel this history of humanity has an additional, deeper meaning. It expresses in itself the structure of reason, and only to that extent is it the history of humanity. Therefore the insight into the anthropological constitution of religion does not necessarily exclude the assumption of a rational constitution of the same. This latter simply takes place on another level, but is the treatment of the same object. Hegel's transition from the anthropological to the speculative concept of religion occurs not as a total break with the earlier point of view, but as the completion of the anthropological dimension through posing the question on another and, according to Hegel's understanding, deeper level. Hegel in no way contests the anthropological dimension; he simply denies that it might be the only one.

The extent to which Hegel's philosophy of religion constantly kept this anthropological dimension in view is shown by his concept of the reconciliation which was achieved in Christianity. Hegel worked out his understanding on the basis of the concept of "need" (Bediirfnis). This construction is already found when Hegel was in Jena, though in no later philosophy of religion lecture is it more pregnantly carried through than in the last lecture we still possess from 1827. Of course, as in Hegel's system in general, anthropology constitutes only one, and indeed the lowest, level of Spirit. So the anthropological concept of religion is likewise-in the Hegelian double-sense of the word-"sublated" in the speculative. Religion is not, as for Feuerbach, the alienated self- consciousness of humanity but the self-consciousness of the absolute Spirit in human spirit. For, according to Hegel, the human essence can




be grasped only through the concept of spirit. It was indeed in the name of humanity that recourse was had to anthropology. But it is Hegel's conviction that whoever declares anthropology to be the last appeal runs the risk of cutting short the concept of the human. This is clearly the disputed question between Hegel and Feuerbach: does anthropology constitute the final horizon within which the human person can understand him- or herself? Or is it requisite and possible that we go beyond the anthropological standpoint? Feuerbach suspected that, in his attempt at a speculative founding of the anthropological, Hegel was forced beyond the religious self-alienation of the human person from its essence, an alienation that had already been rightly overcome, to the establishment of what was merely a new and more sophisticated form of alienation. To this extent Hegel was seen by Feuerbach to have stopped at the standpoint of religion, a standpoint which had already been overcome.

IV Before we can give an answer to the question of the alienational

character of speculation, there remains one problem to be discussed. To what extent is it justified or even necessary to identify the speculative interpretation of religion as a speculative critique of religion? Several times Hegel has stressed that his philosophy of religion had as goal not the destruction of religion but its preservation. According to his well- known position, the single task of philosophy, and especially of his philosophy, was to comprehend the Idea of Christianity. But this very sentence harbors the point from which a speculative critique of religion originates, if we accent the fact that the task of philosophy is to comprehend the Idea of Christianity. Philosophy can only grasp this idea if it itself can produce the Idea. The program of Hegel's philosophy of religion in this respect is none other than the one Lessing sketched in the late Enlightenment period. Lessing wanted neither the total jettison- ing of all positive religion in the name of reason, which was the popular conception of the Enlightenment, nor the conditionless subjugation of thought to the teaching of positive religion, since this would amount to a sacrifice of the intellect. He wanted to form the revealed truths into truths of reason. Out of itself, however, reason cannot produce the teachings of positive religion without changing them; it can produce only those which are implicitly rational. If reason tried anything else, it would be rewarded only with well-deserved laughter. The possibility of such a comprehending constitutes the condition of the possibility of any philosophy of religion at all. This is the case so long as philosophy of religion is not to build up a merely external theory of its object. Philosophy of religion is, rather, to develop religion's content out of grasping reason. Of course, it is in no way necessary, or even simply to be taken for granted, that there is such a thing as philosophy of religion



354 Walter Jaeschke

in this sense of the words. With good reason one can also question whether reason is capable of comprehending the content of revelation. If, however, it should be possible to comprehend the Idea of Christiani- ty, then the convertibility of revelational truth into rational truth is presupposed.

Reason can take the criterion for this forming of the truths of revelation into truths of reason only from itself. Otherwise the result would again be a positive one and not one begotten by reason. With the change of form from religious representation to philosophical comprehension content is also necessarily changed. Much of what belongs to the content of religion simply cannot be grasped in the form of comprehending thought at all, or it is grasped in such a way that the truth of faith loses its specific character, that is, the thrust of all those lines which cannot be accommodated to the criterion of the universality of reason. This assertion-that content changes with the form in which it is known-does not go against Hegel's well-known thesis that religion and philosophy have the same content. It would be a simplistic misunderstanding of the Hegelian concept of the identity of content between religion and philosophy if that identity were conceived as a tranquil, constantly available tautology. This identity is to be understood as a "dialectical," living identity, one not excluding difference, but itself fully realized only as the result of a process of mediation.

As far as philosophy is concerned, this mediation lies in the fact that philosophy comprehends itself as speculative science of the Absolute. It does not grasp itself merely as "what is called the cognition of man," as Hegel once disdainfully formulated it (1977:65). Such a mediation is likewise requisite as far as religion is concerned. This thesis of identity is not equally valid for all religions, but for their concept, and in its full sense only for the religion which is adequate to its concept. As is well known, this religion is for Hegel the Christian religion. However, the Christian religion is the absolute religion only to the extent that it expresses its concept, and that means to the extent it is understood in the sense of the speculative concept of religion.

In looking at a current theological orientation to Hegel, it seems to me to be most important to draw attention to the fundamental meaning of this unavoidable difference between faith and speculation, and to do this more strongly than is usually the case. In this regard, the question of Hegel's personal religious convictions is, in terms of philosophy, simply not to be discussed. This includes the question of whether in his philosophy of religion Hegel made this or that remark, be it on the incarnation, the resurrection, or any other theme. Only that alone which is at all thinkable for a philosophy of religion is philosophically important. This is also the fully justified, though constantly misunderstood, critique made by speculative theism, especially by I. H. Fichte, but also by C. H. Weisse, K. Ph. Fischer, and J. Sengler. They said it was not at all a question of this or that orthodox-appearing citation but of whether




these remarks are simply a document of Hegel's personal piety or whether they can also be grounded theoretically within the scope of his speculative philosophy of religion.

In view of the well-known difficulty of arbitrating the conflict between right and left interpretations of the Hegelian philosophy of religion, it appears to me not only the more important, but also the easier, question to decide which position a speculative philosophy of religion could at all take up without overreaching its boundaries. These boundaries are drawn rather closely, much narrower than those of traditional religion. Indeed, a speculative philosophy of religion must contain itself within these boundaries if it does not wish to lose its philosophical character. Surely, because of this limitation, it is a possible strategy of immunization to contest philosophy's right to speak in questions of religion or to object that, in spite of any philosophical doubt concerning religion's scientific basis, religion forms a living power which even in modern society far outweighs the role of philosophy. But insofar as philosophy is given the right to participate in the discussion, it must be accepted that philosophy, precisely when it takes its character seriously and is not a disguised theology, can to some extent not reproduce the assertions of religion and, again, to some extent can reproduce them only in decisively changed form. This changed form on the other hand affects the truth claim of traditional religion. If, for example, the speculative philosophy of religion interprets Christology in such a way that not one single determinate self-consciousness, but self- consciousness overall, is the absolute Being (Wesen), it necessarily changes the meaning of the religious presentation. This latter erects this self-consciousness precisely as individual and believes it finds the truth in holding fast to the individuality of this self-consciousness. This religious presentation indeed does not locate truth in the transition from individuality to the universality of reason. The speculative philosophy of religion, on the contrary, transposes the individualized expressions of religion into universal sentences, and thereby it unavoidably transcends the truth claim of traditional religion.

Whether the speculative concept of religion is experienced more as a critique of, or an apology for, religion depends only on whether one accepts the premises which constitute the base of its origin. The speculative concept of religion as the self-consciousness of the absolute Spirit must to a great extent appear arbitrary if it is not comprehended as the necessary result of the preceding discussion on philosophy of religion.

The theologico-historical conditions of the genesis of this concept of religion lie in the insight into the impossibility of a historical grounding of Christianity and have found their classic formulation in Lessing's controversial writings. The philosophico-historical conditions, on the other hand, lie in Kant's critique of the form of the philosophical knowledge of God current in the eighteenth century, that is, in the



356 Walter Jaeschke

critique of natural theology. As on other questions, especially in the conception of his Science of Logic, so here too Hegel has drawn with astonishing sharpness the consequences of Kant's critique, though this is obscured by Hegel's often unfortunately harsh polemic against Kant. So long as the rationalistic special metaphysics is considered to be the only form of philosophical knowledge of God, there is no possibility of the slightest objection to Kant. However, there remains only the following alternative: either, first, the renunciation of any knowledge of God based on theoretical reason, to the advantage of a presupposition of God as a postulate of practical reason or to the advantage of the shifting of religion to the subjectivity of feeling; or, second, if this is at all possible, a new and different conception of God, a concept which overcomes the inadequacy and weakness of natural theology. The traditional way of grasping God as an object of consciousness, which was also the dominant way in natural theology, grasps God unavoidably as a finite which, however, ought to be infinite. Therefore a restitution of the traditional concept of God necessarily falls for Hegel out of the realm of the possible. The only possibility of a restitution of a theoretical concept of God, and also the only possible restitution of the ontological proof of God, is Hegel's new, speculative interpretation and, concomitant with it, the dissolution of the concept of God into the speculative concept of religion as the concept of the "absolute Spirit." Religion is not a relationship of consciousness to God as to an object of this consciousness, but "the Divine Spirit's knowledge of itself through the mediation of finite spirit" (1962:206), self-consciousness of the absolute Spirit as the dialectical identity of the divine and human spirit. This speculative concept of religion appeared to Hegel to be the only way to explain religion philosophically after the loss of the objective basis of religion as well as after the critique of the God concept of rationalist metaphysics.

An example may make clear the importance of this change. The just-named grounds eliminate the possibility of making room within a philosophical system for a section proper to "speculative theology" separate from the philosophy of religion. This follows convincingly from the insight into the justification of the Kantian critique of the rationalistic knowledge of God. Philosophy of religion is indeed the discipline which succeeded the rationalistic natural theology. But it can legitimately be this only if it does not again set itself up as vulnerable to the attacks which must be raised against natural theology or in general against a concept of God which grasps God as an object of human knowing foreign to self-consciousness. It is impossible to speak of the Absolute if the human knowledge of the Absolute could not be comprehended as the Absolute's self-knowing.

A short time later there was an attempt to make retrogressive the modification of the conception of system which formed an unavoidable consequence of the speculative concept of religion. The primary reason




for this attempt at a revision of Hegel's philosophy of religion was that the critical consequences of this conception were evident on the then current level of the philosophico-theological discussion.

Here belong the many attempts made by what was called "speculative theism," in conscious opposition to Hegel's systematic conception, to conclude philosophy again with a speculative theology. This group interpreted Hegel's philosophy of religion similarly to the way the left- Hegelians did, but they raised it to the level of a program: to go beyond the speculative restrictions of Hegel's standpoint and to develop a theistic philosophy of religion. This, however, appeared possible only under the condition of a total revision of the Hegelian system. If only to be consistent, those who wished to work out a speculative theology not against Hegel but on the basis of his system would have to undertake posthumous corrections to his system in order to make a conception of speculative theology possible.

Karl Rosenkranz, the representative of the Hegelian center, is an unquestionable witness to this necessity to make a change in the system. He became aware of the critical consequences of the Hegelian systematic conception for the concept of God. He saw himself therefore obliged, along with his so-called "reform" of the Hegelian logic, to undertake a sharp surgical intervention in the very structure of the system. His revision of the system as conceived by Hegel referred art and religion, together with the state, to the section on "objective spirit." The philosophy of the absolute Spirit was no longer to develop, as with Hegel, art, religion, and philosophy, but a speculative theology some- what in the style of speculative theism. This revision of the Hegelian system in favor of concluding with the speculative teaching on God in place of the philosophy of religion constituted, for Rosenkranz, an unavoidable step. For-so Rosenkranz argued-if one would, as Hegel did, work out the philosophy of the absolute Spirit as a philosophy of religion, then this would give the impression that not God but religion was to be the absolute Spirit. Nothing else is in fact Hegel's intention.

Here the necessity of a revision of the Hegelian philosophy of religion as a presupposition of the right-wing Hegelian interpretation becomes palpable. For, according to Rosenkranz, whoever so understands Hegel as to identify not God but religion with "absolute Spirit" understands Hegel in no other way than Feuerbach. To this extent Rosenkranz shared the hesitation of "speculative theism" about the form of the Hegelian philosophy of religion. He showed himself, however, to be a right-wing Hegelian in believing that the systematic changes undertaken by him lay within Hegel's meaning. The speculative theists undertook a comparable modification with the conviction of having overcome Hegel. As ground for his revision Rosenkranz can only allege that the changes must be in line with Hegel's intention, since Hegel could have thought no other way. Whoever would hold fast



358 Walter Jaeschke

to the specific Hegelian form of the philosophy of Spirit would understand religion like Feuerbach. Since Hegel, however, could not have meant this, the revision must lie in accord with Hegel's meaning.

Time does not permit carrying this questioning through to wider themes in the philosophy of religion, such as that of the conflict about Hegel's Christology. Moreover, the results would not change. The new speculative interpretation of religion entails consequences whose effect is hardly less revolutionary for theology than Feuerbach's anthropological critique of religion. This new interpretation could to some extent appear even more threatening for neoorthodoxy, since one could not without further ado laugh at this new interpretation as one presumably could at Feuerbach's critique, at least until the young Karl Barth. This likewise explains the embittered opposition of almost the whole of the then contemporary theology against Hegel's assertion that the content of religion must take flight in the concept. This itself ambivalent challenge was perceived as critical of religion because theologians did not share either Hegel's diagnosis of the difficulties surrounding theology's philosophical basis or his insight into the necessity of the progression of the history of theology and of philosophy. As a result of this disagreement, no motive was even seen for such a flight to the concept.

Whether the speculative reinterpretation of religion is experienced as critical or apologetic depends on whether one shares Hegel's analysis of the aporetic constitution of modern theology. After the loss of the previously unquestioned validity of Christianity, after the Enlighten- ment's critique of the thesis of inspiration, and after Lessing's critique of the historical founding of eternal truths, there was no longer an evident way to really secure theological content other than to retrieve it in reason and, on the other hand, to practice rational theology in the form of a speculative philosophy of religion. Whoever does not accept as valid the alternatives diagnosed by Hegel, that is, either the destruction of religious content or the flight into the concept, will reject the transformation of religion into speculative philosophy of religion as a loss of the specific content of traditional religion. Whoever, on the other hand, shares Hegel's diagnosis will place the apologetic element of his conception in the foreground and also accept the clearly defined conditions under which this retaining of religious content stands: the conditions of the speculative reinterpretation. For this reinterpretation does not in any way let the content of religion simply remain valid in the trivial sense that religion is the form of truth available to all people, but also in the essential sense that philosophy realizes it is obliged to Christianity for its highest principle. This highest principle is that of subjectivity and especially the principle which Hegel calls the "principle of Christianity" - "the self-consciousness of freedom."




V

There were perhaps only two interpreters who grasped the unity of the critical and apologetic moments of the speculative philosophy of religion: Strauss and Feuerbach. For Strauss's critical presentation of the life of Jesus was made possible first of all by Hegel's insight that the content of Christianity was to be salvaged not in history but only in the concept. And Feuerbach's critique that Hegel's position formed the last great attempt to reestablish Christianity (Feuerbach 3:279-80) was motivated by Hegel's offer to provide a more secure basis for Christiani- ty in the concept. On this point there is no dissonance between Hegel and Feuerbach. They disagree only about how this offer is to be valued and, further, about whether this offered refuge in the speculative concept can protect religion also from the anthropological critique.

Behind Feuerbach's emotional and political attacks against a reestab- lishment of Christianity on the basis of the Hegelian concept there stands a serious philosophical motive. In Feuerbach's eyes, Hegel's speculative philosophy of religion formed one step along the way to modern philosophy: the step from theism to pantheism. As is well known, it is a popular objection to Hegel's philosophy of religion that it teaches pantheism. This objection is most clearly distinguished by the fact that such critics are satisfied to assert pantheism, as if this spared them any further discussion. Not so for Feuerbach. He criticized Hegelian pantheism because in his eyes Hegel constituted only the first stage along the way from theism to atheism. The pantheistic speculation eliminated the contradictions exposed in the concept of religious projection, contradictions concerning the theistic form of the God concept. But at the same time this speculation entangled itself in new contradictions. Its result was therefore only a new structure of alienation in place of the old one and not the required sublation of all human self- alienation. Feuerbach also argued that this speculation negated theology only on the level of theology. It did not form the promised contradiction-free resolution of theology in general.

Concerning the systematic necessity of Feuerbach's resolution of theism into anthropotheism, the decisive question is how far he was successful in proving such contradictions in the conception of the speculative philosophy of religion and how far he was able to sublate them in his own proposal. The mere assertion that Hegel formed the last refuge of Christian theology is no adequate critique, even though, in the situation of the reactionary period prior to the 1848 revolution, which was politically and theologically tense in equal measure, it was no longer experienced as an affirmative expression, as with Hegel, but as a devastating critique.

Feuerbach's critique of religion in the Essence of Christianity and later in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion was accomplished above all in two methodological steps. The first step showed the anthropological character, and that meant in Feuerbach's view also the anthropological



360 Walter Jaeschke

origin, of the predicates applied by the theological tradition to God. In this step the critique arrived, by way of the negation of the totality of these predicates, at the negation of the underlying divine subject. If all possible assertions concerning God are acknowledged to be statements about the human, then it is in fact precarious to go on retaining a divine subject, although a negative theology might remain as ultima ratio. This more negative step in Feuerbach's critique is followed by the exchange of subject and predicate in religious statements. By means of this move the sentence "God is love" is changed into the sentence "Love is divine." This second step properly grounds anthropotheism, since divini- ty is now applied to love, which in the first step was seen to belong to the human essence. In this way all the statements of religion can be interpreted as statements about the human. Not as statements about individuals, of course, but about the species. Religion taken as a whole is then understood as the self-consciousness of humanity, but of course as an alienated, self-misunderstanding self-consciousness.

The attacks which Feuerbach can raise against religion by means of these methodological steps carry much weight. Here I would prefer, however, not to discuss possible attempts to refute these attacks, but to emphasize that both these steps of the anthropological critique do not affect the speculative concept of religion precisely because the speculative concept of religion has as one of its strongest motives a critique of the subject-predicate structure and also of the subject-object relation. For the speculative interpretation we have been discussing it is also completely misleading to speak of the assumption of a divine subject to which predicates are applied and which is opposed to self-consciousness as a separated individual. For the speculative grasping of religion it is indeed a historical fact that religion had for the most part so understood itself. Consciousness was seen as standing over against a divine Being and did not arrive at the recognition of its identity with this object. Therefore such a consciousness, which is not in harmony with the concept of religion, remains unhappy. Likewise, the speculative interpretation did not understand religion on the basis of a personal relationship of the believer to God. For the speculative interpretation as well as for the anthropological interpretation, the Divine Being is the essence of humanity and of nature. For otherwise, Hegel says, "It would indeed be a being which was nothing" (1975:53). The speculative concept of religion is in any case unaffected by Feuerbach's critique only if this concept is suitably interpreted, and that means, if it is not interpreted in a right-wing Hegelian fashion. This appears paradoxical. However, not only is it correct on the basis of interpretation, but it is also decisive in view of a current theological orientation to Hegel's philosophy. Other- wise this orientation would run into a dead end. The right-wing Hegelian presupposition of human immortality, of the personhood of God, as well as of the transition from Idea to Fact all fall victim to Feuerbach's critique, as they, when considered as philosophical presuppositions, have already fallen to Kant's critique of special metaphysics.




Feuerbach was continually conscious of the difference between traditional religion and the speculative concept of religion, or, as he said, between common and speculative theology. Even after his break with Hegel, Feuerbach remained true to the left-wing interpretation of Hegel. This is in no way immediately to be taken for granted. Feuer-

Sbach's claim that, unlike Bruno Bauer's position, his is not to be explained as a development of the Hegelian philosophy of religion, but as arising out of opposition to it, could have suggested the possibility of a better distinguishing by means of a right-wing interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of religion. However, while Feuerbach had worked out at great length the arguments against the "sensuous imagination" of traditional religion, his arguments against the "nonsensual abstraction" (3:227) of the speculative philosophy of religion remain conceptually weak. They remain weak in the first formal critique of Hegel (1839) as well as in the Provisional Theses and the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Indeed, both give a great deal of room to the critique of Hegelian philosophy. But they put forth no arguments which on the other hand would not seem embarrassing when considered from the point of view of speculative philosophy. Feuerbach's arguments appeal and provoke, but do not demonstrate.

It is not possible, without further interpretation and critique, to object to Hegel's reduction of religion to the structure of reason by saying that what is involved here is a relationship of projection, that is, that God is placed in something which stands over against the human subject and is not recognized as identical. For reason is, for Hegel, the very essence of the human and not foreign to it. Therefore the final, decisive question both concerning the success of the speculative philosophy of religion as well as concerning the possibility of the anthropological critique is whether Hegel's determination of the relationship of reason to the human misunderstands the essence of both, of reason as well as of the human person. If a theory of objective thought as Hegel had worked it out in his Science of Logic (Jaeschke) is possible, then one cannot raise against the speculative philosophy of religion the objection that in the speculative concept there still remains an unre- solved remnant of alienation. Thereupon it is justified that Hegel understands the self-consciousness made actual in religion as the self- consciousness of God through God's self-knowing in the human person. What this also expresses is that this self-consciousness is not merely human and at the disposal of the individual human person. One must then argue that Feuerbach's critique reaches only that form of religion which would reject Hegel's offer of a rescue by means of the concept. In any case, if such an ontotheology of the concept is illusionary, a nonsensual superstition, as Feuerbach asserted, then the concept of absolute Spirit is also necessarily only what Feuerbach declared it to be-the concept of the abstract finite and therefore of the self-alienated Spirit (3:226-27).



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Concerning the possibility of a philosophy of religion and of a theological appeal to Hegel or to Feuerbach, the finally decisive factor is the discussion of Hegel's Science of Logic, which develops this concept of objective thought, that is, a thought which is not set over against that of finite subjectivity, but on the other hand is not merely at the disposal of finite subjectivity since it forms the basic structure of reality, a structure upon which even finite subjectivity is dependent. Feuerbach's polemic against this conception is not convincing when taken in itself, because it contains too many presuppositions which can be contested from the point of view of speculative philosophy.

In this sense at least, the theoretical controversy between these two positions was not at that time carried to its conclusion. Practically speaking, during the past 150 years the movement of the history of philosophy as well as the history of theology has admittedly voted against speculation. Just as theology has not followed in Feuerbach's anthropological direction, so it has likewise not shared the speculative position. Rather, theology experienced demetaphysization as liberation. Theology seems to have successfully found a third way between the speculative and anthropological critiques of religion. But if we pose the question of philosophical foundations with a sharpness equal to that still common in Hegel's and Feuerbach's days, it is not possible to suppress the suspicion that such a third way owes its semblance of viability rather to ignoring the problem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author expresses deepest thanks to Dale M. Schlitt for translating the German manuscript into English. This essay is a slightly reworked version of a lecture given at Emory University, Vanderbilt University, and Williams College.

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