This paper analyzes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophical approach to life, death, and love within the framework of his dialectical method. The author traces Hegel's intellectual development from Enlightenment thought and German idealism, examining how he redefines fundamental concepts inherited from medieval Christianity. The paper argues that Hegel's system places passion and love at the center of philosophical reconciliation, replacing reason as the primary arbiter of truth. Through examination of Hegel's treatment of the Spirit, his critique of Kantian philosophy, and his application of dialectical method to Christian theology, the paper demonstrates how Hegel synthesizes life and death through a conception of love as the ultimate unifying principle, though at the cost of elevating emotion over rational governance.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born into the world of Kant and Rousseau, a world already transformed from its medieval ancestry—a world remodeled on the revolutionary scientific dogma that reshaped the modern conception of the universe, replacing the Ptolemaic geocentric model with the Copernican heliocentric one. Hegel lived in an era built upon Enlightenment doctrine, which grew out of the new Western Protestant ethos. He was part of the new intellectualism, fired by the light of individuality, liberty, skepticism, and idealism. Hegel, a child of his age, devised his own system of philosophy—a philosophy that was both humanistic and modern and that would attempt to encompass life, death, and love.
What would later be called the Hegelian dialectic, an analysis incorporating the triad structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, was the product of Kantian influence and neo-Kantian development on the part of Johann Fichte, another proponent of German idealism. Through such a structure, Hegel would attempt to reconcile life and death. This paper will explain Hegel's dialectic concerning life, death, and love, showing how life and death are irreconcilable in the Hegelian system, cannot exist as a unified whole, and how love is Hegel's synthetic response to the thesis and antithesis of life and death.
Growing up in Protestant Germany in an era of intellectual redefining, Hegel's tendency was to move toward a new, self-established eschatology. This is not to say that Hegel would not take inspiration from the ancient Greeks, who had influenced medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas. But Hegel also fell into the same vein as Kant and Fichte (and even Rousseau, to some degree). A. R. Bjerke succinctly defines Hegel by quoting from his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: "When we say, 'God is love,' we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is" (Bjerke 2011:77). Hegel is at once accepting of old world definitions and simultaneously skeptical of the common sense that underlies them. A phrase such as "God is love" cannot be stated without scrutiny. Hegel, like Hamlet, by questioning it throws doubt upon the "love," only to revive it through an association with the Spirit.
As Bjerke states, reason and love are intimately connected in Hegelian dialectic. Yet unlike Aquinas, who reconciled faith and reason through divine revelation of God (who is love), Hegel reconciles reason and love without the faith required by Aquinas. Replacing the faith needed to overcome death in Aquinas's perspective is the Spirit. For Hegel, "love has the shape of speculative reason and plays a historical role in the reconciliation of Spirit to itself" (Bjerke 2011:76).
The God of the medieval Western world was inaccessible to the new Enlightenment philosophy of Hegel's age. Hegel's philosophy required a reassessment of God, employing a new structure and ontology to create it. Part of the reason is that Hegel called into question the nature of love—or at least gave it a new nature. From its medieval definition as an exercise of the will toward the good, Hegel reduces love to a "feeling," which takes God (since God is love) out of the realm of the rational and into the realm of the ephemeral. That which is changeless becomes ever-changing; that which is pure Spirit becomes linked to the emotions. Whereas Aquinas linked Spirit with reason, Hegel links Spirit with emotion—the kind of emotion that Rousseau had promoted: unfettered, "true to self," and free. Hegel describes love as: "Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling...love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection" (Bjerke 2011:77). Such musings are romantic philosophical outcomes of one who has experienced the throes of passion, revealing Hegel as someone who felt and experienced love and had difficulty controlling or making sense of it. After all, the claim that "love destroys objectivity" is truly astounding. The fact cannot be readily ignored that Hegel did father an illegitimate child with a young woman with whom he had a liaison. Whether Hegel's love was temporary, unreal, or ungoverned by reason is beside the point for the philosopher, for love destroys objectivity. If God is love, the consequences of such a belief must be addressed.
That God could destroy objectivity would make sense to the young Hegel growing up in the world of Protestant hypocrisy. The scholastic pride in objectivity of the medieval world had been eschewed for the more individualistic, self-promoting doctrine of Protestantism, which denied authoritative interpretation. Christian ecclesiology was no more defined than what the next person made it out to be. If God was love, there was no defining it strictly nor any question of being objective about it. There was only the sense that love was romantic, powerful, and all-consuming, like the works of Goethe, another product of the age of Romanticism and Enlightenment and a sure influence upon Hegel. The morality associated with religion and Christianity especially, whereby human lives are guided toward their final end, becomes elusive and evolutionary, changing according to "the Spirit." Hegel's Spirit sows the seeds for the pluralism of modern times by elevating passion and reducing reason.
The problem with passion's usurpation of the medieval scholasticism's place for reason is that reason is the governance of passion. Passion left to rule itself (as both Hegel and Rousseau claim it must do—Hegel attempting to rationalize such governance) essentially must produce a new code of morality, since the old code, produced under the light of reason according to authoritative interpretation of divine revelation, can no longer be justified in the light of Enlightenment doctrine.
When passion is elevated, reason is no longer at the top of the hierarchy—which means that the sense which helped Greek philosophers know the natural world can no longer be trusted. Knowing the world through one's senses, with the elevation of passion, becomes an untrustworthy exercise. The passions, in control, cannot interpret or act according to sense, since sense and sensation are intimately related with reason. Passion, having taken the place of reason, is left to create a new morality. This is the essence of the Hegelian dialectic. Life and death must be explained according to this new dialect, which means that the entire universe (as understood in the old world) must now be explained anew.
Yet as Howard Gardner states, one "must figure out how intelligence and morality can work together" (Smith 2008). Gardner essentially undercuts the Hegelian premise that love is an emotion. By linking intelligence with morality—a code of conduct—Gardner emphasizes the rational over the passions. Hegel, on the other hand, like Kant and Rousseau, does the opposite.
Like the young Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Hegel saw Napoleon as "the incarnation of the World Spirit (the telos!)" (Life). He had completed Phenomenology of Spirit, and his identification of Napoleon as telos is telling. The arc of Napoleon's career is just as dramatic as the arc of Hegel's experiences with love: passionate, fiery, consequential, as full of death as Hegel's romance had been of life. Napoleon represented the Spirit of the World. Hegel's love represented the Spirit of Life. Here was another thesis and antithesis. The synthesis would prove to be a kind of evolutionary philosophical dogma: "Spirit, therefore, has the purpose (telos) and meaning to be actualized. In this sense, his basic conception came from Leibniz and Fichte, or even from Aristotle" (Life).
Hegel's point is that causality is based on teleology, and teleology is intimately connected to love. Love without governance was like love overflowing, unrestrained—like Napoleon's conquests. "Love can therefore be understood in the context of Hegel's first attempt to establish a philosophy of identity: a solution to the antitheses of Kant's logical categories and to the disunity of life in all its vagaries and determinations" (Bjerke 2011:77). This supposition was expounded upon in Hegel's The Spirit of Christianity, a work that attempted "to comprehend the unity of the oppositional structure of Kantian moral philosophy: duty and inclination, moral law and natural impulse, reason and passion" (Bjerke 2011:77).
What Hegel was essentially wrestling with was what the medieval world had previously understood as the concept of original sin: an understanding that viewed human nature as fallen—in other words, divided. Hegel's concept of the Spirit attempted to make sense of the conflicting elements in human nature: the good and the bad, the controlled and the uncontrollable, the parts that produced life and the parts that produced death.
Hegel made a desperate attempt to rationalize the contradictions found in human nature, but he worked from a framework that was part Romantic and part Enlightenment. His viewpoint was neither traditionally Christian and therefore subject to Church doctrine, nor strictly pagan and therefore subject to strict rationality. Hegel's working out of the thesis and antithesis of life and death, and the synthesis, which is love, is a kind of mystical interpretation of Christian mysteries. What Hegel could not understand in light of objectivity destroyed, he attempted to explain in light of love as the synthesis of life and death. Again, it is the crowning of passion as ultimate arbiter. Love cannot be explained except as it is accountable only to itself. Thus, Hegel could say that God is love without risk of corrupting his doctrine. What Hegel failed to do, however, was unite it with reason, as Gardner states is necessary for a complete picture. Passion, according to Hegel, is still the de facto ruler. Passion, since it is essentially God-like, cannot be ruled. Therefore, love cannot fully be explained but only yielded and submitted to. The effects of such a line of thought are, of course, full of ramifications.
Nonetheless, Hegel attempted to redirect such ramifications by rationalizing passion's power, especially in the Christian mysteries—mysteries which, in the old world, had well enough shown the necessity of curbing passion under the direction of the will of God, which was both reasonable and good. Hegel, however, was left to let passion direct itself and explain why such was necessary through the use of reason. He did so using Mary Magdalene as an example: the sinner whose grief over her sin contradicts her joy at being forgiven. This sense of contradiction is her love, which extinguishes her guilt and manifests itself as "this bliss of love drinking reconciliation from its effusion'" (Bjerke 2011:78). Hegel's reasoning is obviously more a romantic ode to the power of love and less a rational meditation on the Christian essence of forgiveness and gratitude.
However, Hegel is not long to fall out of love with love. Since his emotions govern his intellect instead of his intellect governing his emotions, Hegel cannot fail to do so: "He shifts his attention from love to what he calls the Concept, ostensibly because love falls apart when it reflects on itself whereas the Concept achieves a higher synthesis. In retrospect, however, what appeared as love's failure to reflect on itself was actually the failure of Hegel's identity philosophy more generally" (Bjerke 2011:79).
The introduction of the Concept allows Hegel to assert a kind of objectivity into the equation. But his Concept leads him, however, to a kind of idealism.
Hegel's Concept is love given an objective standard. As Bjerke identifies: "Hegel continually praises love when it attains its rational shape and criticizes faulty versions of love in which love's particular and universal moments are not reconciled" (Bjerke 2011:82). By identifying love with a Concept (even if idealistic), Hegel is able to reconcile what was previously irreconcilable. Hegel takes love out of the abstract and gives it an object, much in the same vein as the medieval world gave humanity a final end. The purpose becomes rooted, not in itself, but in the family—which is, in a sense, the root of love. As lovers grow old and die, their love is continued in the new life that comes from those lovers. The family is a unit that perpetuates love, and love vice versa perpetuates the family. Life and death are not part of one unifying system unless that system understands love within the framework of a higher concept.
Thus, Bjerke states, Hegel "repeatedly faults Schlegel, for example, for exalting the particular drives of the individual over the rational shape of marriage. He also attacks those understandings of love that err on the side of the abstract universal. This includes the view of marriage as contract, various religious abstractions, and the 'monastic attitude' that is characteristic of Platonic love or philosophical contemplation. These attitudes are hostile to the moment of natural life, whereas love in its reflected form harmonizes the particular and the universal" (Bjerke 2011:82).
Here, Hegel follows Rousseau. By elevating passion, he again undermines that which he wishes to create: the perpetuation of love. Yet he insists that such love exist without vows. Vows, it is assumed, are of the rational societal order and impinge upon the freedom of the passions to pursue their own end. Hegel fails to realize that the end of passion is diametrically opposed to the end of reason, at least according to the hierarchical medieval model of human nature.
"Dialectical structure resolves life-death contradiction through negation and Spirit"
In conclusion, Hegel maximizes modern philosophy as established by Kant, Fichte, and others by rooting it in the concrete elements of medieval Christianity. However, his synthesis of medieval theology and modern philosophy produces a new modern theology, in which reason is reduced and passion elevated. Hegel's Spirit takes primacy over the medieval notion of God, becoming the self-sufficient, self-fulfilling raison d'ĂŞtre. The abstract becomes concrete at the expense of reason in Hegel's dialectic.
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