Banishing Hegel from the Garden of Eden: Samuel Hirsch’s DIE RELIGIONSPHILOSOPHIE DER JUDEN

• In Event: Jewish Hegelians

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how Samuel Hirsch frames his work DIE RELIGIONSPHILOSOPHIE DER JUDEN [THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS] as a confrontation with Hegel’s LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. In particular, I explore the prominent role given to Genesis 3, the account of the fall, in this confrontation.

In his LECTURES, Hegel devotes considerable time to explaining Genesis 3. Hegel breaks with traditional Christian understandings of the story, such that in his hands it comes to describe spirit’s own process of self-discovery. Genesis 3, then, ceases to be about sin and is instead to be understood as the beginning of Spirit’s self-awareness which the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion trace through a single continuum of religious traditions culminating in Christianity. In contrast to Hegel, Hirsch emphasizes the role of sin in Genesis 3.

The history of religion is not a single sequence, but rather, like Hirsch’s account of spirit, is riven in two, split between worship of the true God on the one hand and the various forms of paganism on the other. Genesis 3 becomes the site of contest with Hegel because it sets the foundation for the radical opposition between true religion and idolatry that characterizes Hirsch’s alternate account of the history of spirit.

Author

• Robert A. Erlewine, Illinois Wesleyan University