The Young Hegel on ‘Life’ and ‘Love’

Abstract

Wilhelm Dilthey, the first scholar to study Hegel's early writings, most of which have been published by Herman Nohl under the title Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften, examined the thought of the young Hegel in the light of German idealism; Dilthey was interested in establishing the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel Entwicklungsgeschichte. Another line of interpretation, no doubt encouraged by the tide of Nohl's compendium, has been to see these writings as dealing with a religious experience and religious issues. Unique in the literature stands Laurence Dickey's study of intellectual history, in which he shows that the young Hegel was influenced by the culture of Old Württemberg – more specifically, by Württemberg's ideal of Protestant civil piety. Finally, Georg Lukács and Raymond Plant concentrate on the social and political concerns of the young Hegel. On the one side, Lukács, writing from a Marxist perspective, explores the political and economic ideas of the young Hegel as well as the way these have contributed to the development of the dialectical method. For his part, Plant has put forward the view that the essays compiled by Nohl in his collection constitute a series of attempts on the part of the young Hegel to comprehend and account for the cultural and socio-political crisis of his time. For Plant, Hegel sought the causes thereof in religion.I propose to look at the young Hegel from yet another angle. I shall argue that what lies beneath Hegel's exegesis of the Scriptures is a Platonism. H. S. Harris has noted this aspect of Hegel's thought in his seminal study of Hegel's development, but the Platonism of the young Hegel has generally been under-researched. In this paper I shall try to bring this out. To do this, I shall explore the meaning and significance of ‘life’ and ‘love’ by focusing on ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’ essay, the fragment on ‘Love’, as well as some of the fragments in the appendix of Nohl's volume. Let us not forget that, despite his practical concerns, Hegel was also interested in theological doctrine, which, he thought, expressed substantial truths in metaphorical language; so in the ‘Spirit of Christianity’ essay, as well as providing an historical account of Judaism and a description of Christian ethics, Hegel also discusses theological tenets. Hegel always believed that theory and practice go hand in hand, and he was convinced that religion was as much about dogma as it was about practice. For this reason I deem it necessary to look at Hegel's interpretation of Christian theology in the course of this paper.