05.12.09

Booknotes: Solomon book on Hegel. Was Hegel an atheist?

Posted in atheism, Booknotes, Philosophy at 7:11 pm by nemo

In the Spirit of Hegel, by Robert Solomon

I was a bit cavalier with Hegel today (sorry, didn’t mean a word of it), in my post on Wright’s book and Sullivan’s review. Or perhaps not.
Hegel is something of an enigma, and the book by Solomon is unusual in pursuing the underground tradition that arose after his death, to the effect that he was actually an atheist.
This argument, not popular with many theological Hegelians, is not a view I either share or reject, I merely point to the larger historical context of German Classical philosophy and its significance.

This book might be of interest to secular humanists trying to grasp the way in which plain vanilla atheism, which is at least honest and out front, and even granting that the deviousness of Hegel makes him no role model, craps out as easily as naive theism.
Hegel is seeking the third term in the dialectic (??) between theism and atheism, and his overworked brain cranks out ‘geist’. The term could be freely translated ‘cosmic chewing gum’.
I don’t buy it, but it is curiously interesting to observe from a distance, and if string theorists can do better, let me know, STAT.
It is an indirect exercise in what is meant by the term ‘god’, if that is a question that still has any importance.
Hegel’s transposition of the semantics of reference arises in a kind of descant on the fate of Protestantism in modernity.
Perhaps it isn’t important, perhaps Solomon is wrong, and yet the strange experiment of Hegel is a challenge to humanists to consider something more than tin-can atheism as a pat belief system, based, no less, on the sawdust foundations of Darwinism.

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