The Fate of Reason in Modernity: Hegel on Religion, Love, and Alterity

DiBona, Christopher D.

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: DiBona, Christopher D (creator); Lewis, Thomas (Advisor); Cladis, Mark (Reader); Bush, Stephen (Reader); Willis, Andre (Reader); Nahme, Paul (Reader); Farneth, Molly (Reader); Brown University. Department of Religious Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Love; Religious ethics; Phenomenology; philosophy of religion; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831; Lévinas, Emmanuel; Other (Philosophy); Philosophical Ethics; German idealism; Philosophy, Modern; Postmodernism
Extent:: 10, 259 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation aims to demonstrate that the writings of G.W.F. Hegel afford us timely and generative resources for diagnosing, understanding, and addressing ethical and political dimensions of how we engage with others – especially “others” not like “us” – in the present moment, both within the academic humanities and within modern Western societies at large. I approach this task by first explicating influential postmodern criticisms of Hegelian rationality as the epitome of totalizing thinking, outlining prominent postmodern approaches to alterity that emerge in the wake of these criticisms, and identifying the limitations of these approaches. In light of these limitations, I then offer a reinterpretation of Hegel’s conception of reason by reconstructing the account of love developed across his early and mature writings on Christian religion and demonstrating love’s enduring significance to the account of reason developed across his corpus. Foregrounding the significance of love to reason serves two purposes. First, it allows us to broach and challenge contemporary and long-running interpretive debates at the core of Hegel scholarship, including the relation between Hegel’s early and mature writings, the place of love in Hegel’s system, the relation between religious representation and philosophical thought, the Hegelian conception of God, the relational nature of autonomy, and the democratic nature of the state. Second, it reveals that reason, far from being a totalizing vehicle, is in fact capable of fostering complex, integrated, and yet non-totalizing modes of thinking about and relating to alterity within the domains of ethics, politics, and religion. The upshot of these efforts reveals that Hegel – a quintessential modern thinker – is well-situated to help us address the important postmodern preoccupation with welcoming the other.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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DiBona, Christopher D., "The Fate of Reason in Modernity: Hegel on Religion, Love, and Alterity" (2021). Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:vsmvue8t/

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Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Religious Studies department.
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