Oliver Scholz wrote:

>
>Bob Wallace <philosop@...> writes:
>
>[...]
>> They translate the final sentence:
>> "Since the [more] serene, less well grounded, and more individual
>> style of the dogmatic philosophies anmd of the natural religions must
>> vanish, the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection
>> solely from this harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing
>> everything, and ascending in all its ernestness and out of its
>> deepest ground to the most serene freedom of its shape."
>
>Ah, my mistake. In German the whole last passage starting with
>
> "Der reine Begriff aber oder die Unendlichkeit als der Abgrund des
> Nichts, worin alles Sein versinkt, muß den unendlichen Schmerz,
> der vorher nur in der Bildung geschichtlich und als das Gefühl
> war, worauf die Religion der neuen Zeit beruht - das Gefühl: Gott
> selbst ist tot [...] --, rein als Moment, aber auch nicht als mehr
> denn als Moment der höchsten Idee bezeichnen [...]"
>
>is a single, page long sentence. It was to be expected that a
>translator would break that sentence into parts.

Yes, I didn't check but I suspected that might be the case. Here's
the first part:
"But the pure concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness in
which all being is engulfed, must signify the infinite grief [of the
finite] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a
moment. Formerly, the infinite grief only existed historically in the
formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that 'God
himself is dead,' upon which the religion of more recent times rests;
the same feeling that Pascal expressed in so to speak sheerly
empirical form: 'la nature est telle qu'elle _marque_ partout un Dieu
_perdu_ et dans l'homme et hors de l'homme.' [Nature is such that it
signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man.] By
marking this feeling as a moment of the supreme Idea, the pure
concept must give philosophical existence to what used to be either
the moral precept that we must sacrifice the empirical being (Wesen),
or the concept of formal abstraction [e.g., the categorical
imperative]. Thereby it must re-establish the Idea of absolute
freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good
Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be
speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its
Godforsakenness."

>
>I might as well hint at what I am intending: I am going -- hopefully
>in a later email -- to prepare an argument that with regard to "god"
>in the system both theism and atheism are one-sided and abstract. And
>that, unlike "absolute spirite", "god" -- being a word that rather
>belongs to religious vorstellung than to philosophy -- in a modern
>context inevitably conjures a theistic one-sidedness, again: in
>vorstellung. (None of us is a late 18th century German. His
>contemporaries had a rather good feeling for the ambivalence in
>Hegel's account of "god".) That last sentence is one of the few
>passages, at least as far as I know, where that ambivalence, der
>spekulative karfreitag, is explicit.

I would suggest the _Science of Logic_'s discussion of spurious and
true infinity as another key passage; together with the
Phenomenology's critique of the "unhappy consciousness." I hope we
all know that Hegel is a sharp critic of conventional theism. The
question is, what if anything does he think we can and should _learn
from_ conventional theism, after we've criticized it. And finally
there is the obviously difficult question, which you raise, of what
words to use in naming and describing what we learn from it. I've
suggested a formulation--a definition, if you like--of what we're
talking about: a higher reality, composed of freedom and love, that
lends to everything else whatever full reality it possesses. (I'm
prepared, of course, to explain my reasons for believing that this,
in fact, is part if not all of what Hegel means by "absolute
Spirit.") Given the strong parallels, in this idea, to the
traditional conceptions of "creation" and "salvation," it seems to me
to be appropriate to use the traditional word, "God," to designate
it. Recognizing, obviously, that one has frequently to explain what
one means by the word. Euphemisms like "the ground of being" or "the
origin" or "the source" don't seem to me to do the job. Nor does
"absolute Spirit," which leaves everyone wondering what each of the
two words means. Hegel also uses the word "God"; so does Plato; so do
Emerson and Whitehead; and that continuity is enough for me. They
knew what they were talking about, and that's what I'm talking about.
I live in their world. But it's true that I also live in the world of
Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath and so on; and for them, we have
to do a lot of explaining. Or perhaps I should say, educating.

I look forward to hearing your further thoughts on this, Oliver. I'd
be grateful to hear anything you might share with us about current
discussions in Germany on these topics. I think Habermas, for
example, has recently shown more interest in religion than
previously. Are any of the younger people in Frankfurt pursuing these
issues?

Best, Bob
--
Robert M. Wallace
2503 E. Olive St.
Shorewood, WI 53211
USA