Revealed Religion and Absolute Knowledge

Abstract

Many commentators have misunderstood Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge at the end of the Phenomenology in the same way as they have wrongly interpreted his ‘absolute spirit’ as a source of cosmic rationality. According to Charles Taylor: ‘Hegel claims to be able to demonstrate the existence of a cosmic spirit who posits the world according to rational necessity’.¹ And, in one of the most sympathetic works on Hegel to have emerged within the Marxist tradition, Georg Lukács credits Hegel for his insight into the nature of human activity and praxis, but then interprets ‘absolute spirit’ as an external agency. Says Lukács, ‘Hegel lost his way in the miasmus of idealism where a mystified demiurge carried on its activities.... ’² This is not a far step from a traditional theistic interpretation of Hegel where, at the end of the Phenomenology when absolute spirit is identified with God, the account of spirit as an external guiding force is cited as evidence of Hegel’s theistic idealism which was later rejected by Marx. Thus William Leon McBride, in The Philosophy of Marx, says that at the end of the Phenomenology, ‘it becomes clear that absolute spirit is to be identified with God—a somewhat unorthodox divinity, to be sure, immanent in the world, which has caused itself to evolve by means of the actual minds of individuals and the “spirits” (this metaphor of ordinary language is to be taken literally in Hegel) of various epochs of civilization.