Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Hegel's Phenomenology
- 1 Why the Phenomenology of Spirit?
- 2 The claims to self-sufficient knowledge: sense-certainty, perception, understanding
- 3 The claims of self-sufficient agency: freedom and self-consciousness
- 4 Modern life's project of self-justification
- 5 Modern life's alternatives and modern life's possibilities
- 6 The self-reflection of the human community
- 7 The essential structure of modern life
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
6 - The self-reflection of the human community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Hegel's Phenomenology
- 1 Why the Phenomenology of Spirit?
- 2 The claims to self-sufficient knowledge: sense-certainty, perception, understanding
- 3 The claims of self-sufficient agency: freedom and self-consciousness
- 4 Modern life's project of self-justification
- 5 Modern life's alternatives and modern life's possibilities
- 6 The self-reflection of the human community
- 7 The essential structure of modern life
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Religious practice as self-reflection
The reflections on the nature of religion begins to bring to a close that series of reflections on spirit as social practice – that is, on the series of self-understandings and accounts of what is taken as authoritative that began with the Greek alternative to modernity and ends with the fully modern self-understanding that structures the community that unites the post-revolutionary Kantian conception of autonomy as impersonal rationality with romantic discourse about personal self-choice. These various forms of self-understandings about the self-identity of the community have led to a conception of a form of social practice which is a form of “absolute reflection” – that is, what Hegel calls absolute spirit: a given community's reflection on its essential self-identity and its highest interests through the historical practices and institutions of art, religion, and philosophy.
The section on “absolute spirit” is necessary to explain the kind of teleology that has occurred in the move from the Greek Sittlichkeit to the culmination of modern life in the uniting of Kantian and romantic conceptions of autonomy. Only when such “reflective institutions” are established – that is, when social practices are established whose function is to reflect on, and thereby to affirm or disaffirm that what a given form of life takes as authoritative reasons for belief and action really are authoritative reasons – can there be a teleological historical progression.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hegel's PhenomenologyThe Sociality of Reason, pp. 221 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994