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pete
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here i am working on hegel's introduction to the philosophy of history again (see bull_shit). this time instead of trying to understand or accept his reasoning i am placing it in the historical context where it properly belongs and can be best understood. i am ignorning the problematic constructions of history (in all its meanings, and spirit (in all its complexities) for the moment. instead i am seeking to flesh out hegel's place in the contemporary religious debates of early 19th century protestantism.
its interesting to see the same debates that politically galvanised upper canada being played out in the staunchly conservative and authoritarian post-1819 Prussia in which the intro to the philo of hist was given. in both contexts an important theological debate was taking places between those who supported a religion based upon experience (such as the Wesleyan Methodists of Upper Canada and Schleiermacher in Prussia) and those who upheld a religion based on rational order (Anglicans and Hegel).
the way these various individuals saw god in their lives, in their societies, and in their states created passionate debates that threatened to shake both societies to their very cores. in upper canada the disestablishmentarian movement saught to remove god from the state while using the state as a means for spreading religious truth. in prussia the universities were religious (and thus political) hotbeds in a society where professors and priests were state officials, subject to dismissal from the king and his ministers.
religious dissent in both cases was very closely related with political dissent. opposing the Evangelical Union or Anglican establishment was a form of political activism. the reasons for opposition lie in disagreements over the role of "spirit" and "religion" in daily affairs, if not on the finer points of communion and social responsibility.
hegel saw the world as an ordered cosmos with "spirit" (which is equatable to the greek 'nous' in many respects, but nearly synonymous with the holy spirit of the christian trinity) as the driving force. human experience of history is defined by the slow process of the spirit becoming self aware. state-structures rose and fell, and rose again out the ashes of their predecessors, evoking a more pure selfrealisation of spirit. humans are the avatars of spirit's attempts to know itself.
schleiermacher, on the other hand, saw god as knowable through feelings. the feeling of any given epoch represents that epochs theological truth. spirit, manifest in our very real human experiences, is not knowable rationally but experientially. but there is danger in this formulation, as the methodists discovered. if god is only known through a personal experience, then what good is scripture, state, and society after this personal revelation takes place?
groups such as the shakers (rooted in England around the time of the civil war) answered that question as follows: if we know god personally, and are saved through personal experience of the divine, then social, statutory, and scriptural law no longer applies to the individual. with salvation comes a liberation from the necessities of law and order.
religions of feeling risk a dissolution of the bonds of society. even in moderation these movements can be dangerous, as hegel pointed out in his moderate opposition to the student movements of his day. he saw these students, and their faculty supporters, as "romantic revolutionaries" who threatened the stability of the established order, which is modelled on spirit's self knowledge.
hegel's moderation comes with the realization that change is presence at the root of his thought. spirit is a self-aware divine existence that comes to know itself through the historical actions of human beings. while human order is the product of spirit, through world-historical figures spirit comes to know itself at a more elevate level and the order of human society changes, becomes more 'free'. (hegel's conception of freedom is another problematic that I don't care to deal with at the moment.)
religions of feeling, while popular, are threatening to the established order of society, often formulated in relation to god by memebers of the religions of order. while both religions exist in a very real way within a single tradition (protestant christianity in the early 19th century) they are in direct opposition to each other on many key theological points.
however as the century progressed, in upper canada/canada west/ontario, the religions of feeling became tempered by the needs of society which they entered as settlement became more stable. this resulted in the construction of churches and the regulation of bodies in space (rather than the open air revivals of the earlier decades). sunday schools, weekly church meetings, and other such things came together, tempering the religions of feeling with means of ordering societies. while feeling was not abandoned, order was imposed upon those feelings in ways that suggest hegel (though i doubt hegel was known or cared about in mid 19th century ontario)....
sorry about your irony, explosions in the sky
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061015
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