Keine Revolution ohne Reformation: Staat und Religion in Hegels Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften

Abstract

The contribution focuses on the difficult relationship between state and religion in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Its systematic point of departure is the alternative attribution of this topic to the sphere of absolute spirit and to that of objective spirit in the first and second version, respectively, of the Berlin Encyclopaedia (1827, 1830). The contribution aims to show that the twofold systematic location for treating the relation between state and religion in the Berlin Encyclopaedia reflects Hegel’s complex account of the modern state as both clearly separate from and closely linked to modern religion. To that end the contribution first addresses the basic systematic and architectonic character of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia project, then turns to the successive development of a specifically modern conception of ethico-civic life (Sittlichkeit) in the Nuremberg, Heidelberg und Berlin versions of the Encyclopaedia and finally elucidates the rapprochement of the ethico-civic life form of the modern state and the spiritual character of modern religion effectuated, in complementary ways, in the two Berlin versions of the Encyclopaedia.