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Dialectic
and Gospel in the Development of Hegel's Thinking Stephen Crites
1998 | 6 x 9 inches
Philosophy - History
Hardback: $86.00 SH
ISBN-13: 978-0-271-01759-4
Hegel
came to maturity as a philosopher during the first years of the nineteenth
century, developing through prodigious intellectual struggles a highly
original conception of dialectic as a method for rationally comprehending
traumatic historical change. At the same time, he continued a process
begun earlier, of critical engagement with the Christian gospel and
its historical ethos. Hegel spent much of his youth reacting against
this drama and its cultural expression. By the time he published his
early masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he
had found an ingenious way of reconstructing it in counterpoint with
his new dialectical understanding of historical experience.
Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel's Thinking tells the story of this interplay as it develops in Hegel's thinking.
It culminates in a fresh interpretation of the Phenomenology
of Spirit and a detailed commentary on larger portions of the
text relevant to that story. Its reading of the masterpiece is contextualized
by three substantial chapters detailing the course of Hegel's reflections
on Christian themes through the first thirty-five years of his life.
These chapters are both biographical and textual, treating not only
the philosopherĖs personal and intellectual development but also
the major cultural influences that informed it. Hegel is seen to
have begun as a child of the Enlightenment powerfully affected by
the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment who finds his way to
his own position as a founding genius of German Idealism and its
historical dialectic. His development is thus interpreted as an
epitome of a major transformation in European intellectual history.
Stephen
Crites is Hedding Professor of Moral Science and Professor
of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. He is translator of Crisis
in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama (Collin and
Harper Torchbooks, 1967) and author of In the Twilight of Christendom:
Hegel vs. Kierkegaard on Faith and History (AAR Studies in Religion,
1972).
