11.28.09

Was Hegel an atheist?

Posted in atheism at 1:16 pm by nemo

In the Spirit of Hegel (Paperback)
~ Robert C. Solomon

I was just looking again at Solomon’s older book on Hegel. I hold no brief for particular veins of Hegel interpretation, this work adopted a novel and ‘shocking’ argument that Hegel was really an atheist in disguise.
It is hard to arrive at the truth of the matter, but his thesis makes another point: one that the New Atheists might consider.
While most Hegel scholars would theistically condemn this book I think that Solomon stumbled on something, even if he is perhaps wrong aboujt Hegel.
Hegel is neither a theist or an atheist: he is moving to transcend the whole game, and speaks only of ‘sprit’, a dangerous term that will cause him perhaps to slide back into the morass of the bad dialectic of divinity. But the point is clear.
I mention this because the position of the New Atheists is merely a dialectical reversal of a given notion, and proceeds to its own errors.

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