| COMMENTS ON HEGEL |
| Fr. Robert Levis
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| Hegel is
the complete historicist, i.e. everything is true in its own time and place but
that's all. He professes to know only the appearance of things, not the
substance nor reality. All the real is rational, all the rational is real, thus
he is a perfect subjectivist. Man is the highest expression of the divine, as
well as the highest manifestation of the mode of God. There is no statis reality
for him but only dynamic reality, everything is always moving. "To exist is
to be in process, in change, in transit from one thing to another." The
dialectic is the highest principle of Hegel's metaphysics. This is the only law
of logic and philosophy and of reality. He holds only for the dialectic of the
outmoded past. There is no such thing as abiding truth or value. This new
concept of truth, always looking at the past as something outmoded, is the
perfect application of his dialectic. He taught man to expect no intellectual
peace. Truth is never something seen and possessed but there must always be
further qualifications and change. We must always be traveling to a new
antithesis; to another synthesis and never even to rest there. He wished to
change fixed concepts into fluid ones since no idea has an abiding memory. There
are no such things as eternal truths expressed in propositions always and
everywhere valid. (There goes dogma.)
Hegel was a religious man, but a pantheist. He is the Aquinas of Protestantism. He subordinated religion to philosophy by the dialectics of the World Spirit. He brought religion inside philosophy, seeing philosophy as superior wisdom which evaluates religion. To Hegel the Incarnation is nothing but an early mythical expression of the truth of the dialectic which reveals the progressive incarnation of the Spirit. So Kierkegaard accused Hegel of atheism, and Kierkegaard was correct. Hegel is the philosophical predecessor of liberal Protestantism, Catholic Modernism, and Reformed Judaism. Heidegger was a pupil of Hegel, Fr. Karl Rahner was an admirer of Heidegger,( an interesting connection.) |
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