METHODOLOGICAL GUIDELINES IN SCHELLING’S AND HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Annotation

The modern world, according to the apt remark of J. G. Fichte, is indifferent to truth and raises the flag of the relativity, which reduces religion to an ordinary and accidental element of culture, so that faith becomes only a personal choice. This misses the unconditional content of religion, which defines its essence — the overcoming of relativity and conditionality. The philosophical comprehension of religion is hampered by the lack of consensus about method: direct intuition, mediating relative rationality or dialectical reasonableness — which is more consistent with the philosophical thinking. The article undertakes a comparative analysis of the philosophers of classical German Idealism, denoting opposite intents in solving this question: F. W. J. Schelling as standing at the origin of non-classical rationality and G. W. F. Hegel, who discovered speculative logical method. Late works of thinkers are analyzed: Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation” and Hegel’s “Lectures on the Proof of the Existence of God”. The comparative analysis of their methodological attitudes is carried out in 5 stages: identification of the attitude to the epoch, understanding of the method in general and the principle of philosophical doctrine in particular, the problem of immediacy and mediation, the nature of thinking. It’s justified the conclusion about the superiority of the concept of spirit in Hegel’s “Lectures” over the pure being, or prius, of Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation”

Keywords

philosophy of religion, Schelling, Hegel, method, thought, being, spirit, immediacy, mediation, dialectics

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The study was funded by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 24–28–00883
“Social and philosophical reception of Christianity in the contgext of postsecular culture of the
second half of the 20th — beginning of the 21st centuries” (Federal Center of Theoretical and
Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences), https://rscf.ru/en/project/24–28–00883/