Taylor's Journey to HegelJourneys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Mark C. Taylor

Abstract

Mark Taylor has given us an important book about Hegel and Kierkegaard because he has written a Hegelian critique of Kierkegaard as well as a novel interpretation of Hegel. First, one of the most important strands of Taylor's argument relates to Hegel's youthful desire to be a Volkserzieher. However, as Taylor develops this theme it becomes apparent that he thinks of the term far too loosely. Hegel emphasized the Volk as much as he did the Erziehung; Taylor emphasizes only the Erziehung. This neglect of attention to the Volk enables Taylor to read the Phenomenology as a Bildungsroman, a paradigm of wayfaring and the true journey to neglect of the Volk enables Taylor to existentialize and individualize Hegel to the degree that he sounds like a pilgrim wayfarer on a journey to selfhood rather than the systematic and encyclopedic philosopher he was. As an instance of the neglect of the social and political dimensions, Taylor treats religion in this book only as a means to selfhood. Hegel, on the other hand, from his early writings to the Philosophy of Right, which he had just finished reediting when he died, held rather that religion was politically functional, that the body politic was the highest good, and that religion must finally be considered as subordinate to the political ends of the state. For Hegel, The state is the divine will, in the sense that it is mind present on earth, unfolding itself to be the actual shape and organization of the world.1 There is nothing in his other works in which he ruminates in his remarkable way about incarnation and fall, trinity, etc., that sets aside or modifies this politically functional view of religion. By neglecting the central point Hegel makes about the relation of state and religion, Taylor is able to existentialize Hegel's views all too easily.