298 } Notes to Chapter 2
- In PR § 270 , Hegel states that religion is a foundation for the state only insofar as
religion has truth as its content, and that, even then, it is only a foundation (Grundlage) and
not yet the state’s realized Sittlichkeit. On Hegel’s understanding of religion as a foundation
of the state, see Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 296 – 306. - Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie (the Ilting edition), 1 : 293.
- Ibid.
- “On the contrary, the development of this Idea has established the truth [of the prop-
osition] that spirit, as free and rational, is inherently (an sich) ethical, that the true Idea is
actual rationality, and that it is this rationality which exists as the state. It has further emerged
just as plainly from this Idea that the ethical truth which it embodies is present for thinking
consciousness as a content on which the form of universality has been conferred—that is,
law—and that the state in general knows its ends, and recognizes and implements them with
a determinate consciousness and in accordance with principles” (Hegel, PR § 270 ). - Ibid. Hegel is here railing not against “polemical” forms of Protestantism but against
the illegitimate, irrational authority of the Catholic Church. He adds parenthetically: “In
Protestantism, there is no laity, so that there is likewise no clergy to act as an exclusive depos-
itary of church doctrine”—in other words, Protestantism does not infantilize its adherents,
who are permitted and expected to think for themselves. - Ibid.
- Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 328.
- Hegel, PR § 270. For Hegel, art and religion are also forms of knowing, but not cogni-
tive, scientific knowing, not knowing als ein Gedachtes. - Hegel’s position on Jewish assimilation, however, does not necessarily vitiate the
interpretations of those who see Gans’s Hegelian vision as striking a balance between in-
tegration and the assertion of a form of particularity. (See, for example, Livné-Freudenthal
[“Kultur als Weltanschauung,” 65 ], Schorsch [TC, 216 ], or Waszek [“Hegel, Mendelssohn,
Spinoza,” 197 ].) Jewish Hegelians’ visions of Jews within a differentiated Sittlichkeit should
not be assumed to be identical to Hegel’s. - Hegel, PR § 270. Wood identifies Friedrich Schlegel as the defender of the idea of
the “Christian state” whom Hegel “seems to have in mind here” (ibid., editor’s footnote 12 ). - Ibid., § 270.
- Ibid. Hegel also writes: “Instead of mastering one’s opinions by the labour of study
and subjecting one’s volition to discipline so as to elevate it to free obedience, the easiest
course is to renounce cognition of objective truth, to nurse a sense of grievance and hence
also of self-conceit, and to find in one’s own godliness all that is required in order to see
through the nature of the laws and of political institution, to pass judgment on them, and
to lay down what their character should and must be. And indeed, since these are the find-
ings of a pious heart, they must be infallible and indisputable; for if we make religion the
basis of our intentions and assertions, these cannot be faulted on account of either their
shallowness or their injustice (Unrechtlichkeit)” (ibid.). Wood identifies Fries as the target of
Hegel’s polemic here (ibid., editor’s footnote 5 ). - Ibid, § 270.
- Laurence Dickey underscores the social thrust of Hegel’s Protestantism as a political
ideology and shows that Hegel’s “Protestantism” was in fact directed against the Ortho-
dox Protestantism of 1820 s Prussia, which Hegel saw as mired in narrowly subjectivist faith