Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason

This manuscript provides a revisionist reading of Hegel’s 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, in which he critiques the various reconciliations of faith and reason proposed by his immediate predecessors and contemporary faith philosophers - namely, Kant, Jacobi, Schleiermacher and Fichte. Hegel’s agonistic interpretation of these reflective philosophers of subjectivity, who he reads as settling for a form of reason that is no longer worthy of the name and a version of faith that no longer seems worth the bother, not only demonstrates his growing facility with the dialectical method for which he is best known but it also anticipates his own speculative reconciliation of faith and reason. To view Hegel’s reading of his predecessors as a series of misreadings, which is not uncommon among scholars of 19th century German philosophy, misses the most instructive aspect of this early but formative essay: Hegel, who was viewed by others if not also by himself as a philosophical latecomer, appropriated the thought of his precursors with an eye toward overcoming them.