Critique of historical reason

Like (and yet opposed to) Marx's atheistic political eschatology, Kierkegaard's Christian political eschatology is an eschatological delegitimation of the worldly power on theological foundation: what occurs here, in Marx as much as in Kierkegaard, is the ‘critique’ (not in a Kantian sense, but in the sense of ‘delegitimation’) of that historical reason which arose at the wake of Enlightenment (see Löwith 1991). With the Hegelian transformation of the Kantian empty form of time into the world-historical process of reason – reason that has become now ‘processual’, and thus has become more ‘cunning’ – the ‘reconciliation’ (achieved through dialectical ‘mediation’) between the Weltgeschichte (profane history) and Heilsgeschichte (sacred history) is supposed to have become complete (in the sense of Vollendung: completion as much as termination; one can also call it ‘epochal’: dated and fulfilled, closed and accomplished at the same time), according to Hegel's own claim, and in accordance to the demand of his ‘philosophy of history’. For Hegel, this absolute point of mediation or synthesis is achieved on the cross, on that ‘speculative Good Friday’: this is indeed the work of the cross (Hegel 1988: 191)! The cross crosses, has already crossed, the abyss between knowledge and faith, the abyss that the Kantian transcendental philosophy set open once more. The reason that has crossed this abyss, and by its work of ‘absolute negativity’ has rendered itself into a ‘speculative proposition’ (Hegel 1977) thereby, has thought itself to have successfully taken away the apocalyptic sting of the sacred. Hegel's speculative philosophy of history does not know, even though merely formal, the ‘infinite task’ of Kantian teleological history:

God now sojourns on earth like Odysseus, and ‘incarnates’ himself on the successive forms of world-historical reason which, in the objective sense, are the world-political states and civilisations. Voltaire's ‘philosophy of history’ becomes, in Hegel's dialectical movement of mediation and synthesis, a ‘theodicy’: