June 1, 2021
THE IMAGO DEI IS THE TRANSENDANT TRUTH:
READING HEGEL RIGHT: a review of Leo Strauss on Hegel Edited by Paul Franco (Grant Havers, SPRING 2021, Modern Age).
Hegel writes in his 1795 essay "The Positivity of the Christian Religion" that "the supplanting of paganism by Christianity is one of those remarkable revolutions whose causes the thoughtful historian must labor to discover." The reasons Christianity triumphed over the paganism of Greco-Roman antiquity and the religions of the East preoccupied Hegel to the end of his life. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered at the University of Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel outlined how Christianity actualized an idea of human freedom that was inconceivable to pagan civilizations: "Eastern nations knew only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world only that some are free; while we [Christians] know that all men absolutely . . . are free."One implication of Hegel's theory of history is that no return to paganism is possible, however much we might admire aspects of the ancient world. Philosophers who seek a return to antiquity must address the challenge of Hegel.Readers familiar with Leo Strauss may be surprised, therefore, by the seminar on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History that he gave at the University of Chicago in 1965. On the few occasions that Strauss mentions Hegel in works intended for publication, the reader gets the unmistakable impression that Hegel's philosophy initiated the doctrine of historicism. In Strauss's view, historicism undermined political philosophy by dismissing the idea of a transcendent truth that exists apart from history.
That truth existed long before we arrived at the democracy, capitalism, and protestantism that institutes it and obtains where those institutions are still pending.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2021 9:07 AM