Hegel & Judaísmo.

O texto abaixo é um trecho da biografia do Hegel escrita por Terry Pinkard. Senti falta de algumas observações feitas por ele numa das inúmeras discusões que tive com colegas no último ano. Mas, paciência: “Hegel: A Biography” tem quase mil páginas e não é um livro para ser lido no supapo.

“Hegel’s Berlin “phenomenology” of religions thus recapitulated (with much more detail and subtlety) some key themes of the earlier Jena Phenomenology. However, by 1827, Hegel had come to new conclusion about what followed from that. The problems of Greek religion, he now thought, required it to “elevate” itself into something more coherent, which he now for the first time identified as the Jewish religion characterized as the “religion of sublimity”. The Greek gods were the embodiments of human perfection in beautiful, sensuos form; the Jewish God, however, was freed from this kind of “finite” conception of the divine and was instead conceived as “infinite”, purely spiritual, without shape. The Jewish God thus is “subjectivity that relates itself to itself”

In his earlier writtings on Judaism, Hegel had seen it as merely a religion of legalistic servility. In the Phenomenology, except for a few passing comments, Judaism was simply left undiscussed, as if it did not even matter in the history of humanity’s self-consciousness. However, since arriving in Berlin, Hegel had clearly been mulling over and rethinking his stance on Judaism, and the impetus for this reevaluation was almost certanly his friendship with Edward Gans. For his own part, Hegel remained , as far as we can tell, fully ignorant of al the nonbiblical writings of Judaism (such as the Torah), and he seems to have been more or less ignorant about the development of Judaism since Roman times. Gans was himself, however, intensely interested in questions regarding Judaism and the relation of the Hegelian philosophy to them; and Hegel almost certainly began to change his mind about the status of Judaism in history in light of Gans’s queries.

Judaism presented a distinct problem for Hegel’s views. Given his view of history, Judaism should have vanished along with Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religions; like them, having once played its role on the stage of history, it had no longer had any reason for existing, since its own internal problems (which Hegel saw as resolved in Christianity) should have gradually undermined the ability of the Jews to sustain their religion – just as the problems with Greek religion had inevitably undermined the Greek’s ability to maintain their religious beliefs and way of life.

At first, Hegel had seemed to attribute the survival of Judaism simply to the Jews’ own stubbornness in holding on to dead legalistic practices. In his first lectures on Judaism in his Berlin period in 1821, Hegel still argued that Jewish religious consciousness was essentially servile, since God was represented as an “abstract” power for whom absolute obedience was requiered and whose commands, because of the “abstractness” of both Jewish conception of God and the commands themselves, could not be rationally comprehended. By the time he was again lecturing on the topic in 1824, however, things had dramatically changed; in 1824, Hegel suddenly presented the Jewish God as being more “spiritual” then were previous religious conceptions of divinity, and “wisdom” had come to be seen as one of the defining features of the Jewish divinity. Indeed, what had seemed only servile in 1821 (the “fear of the Lord”) had by 1824 – after the friendship with Gans had started – come to be seen as the “begining of wisdom” (although Hegel had much earlier cited that same biblical passage in his section on mastey and servitude in the Phenomenology). By 1827, Hegel described the Jewish God as the embodiment of the “goodness and wisdom”, and, in an even more striking development, he ranked Jewish religion as “higher” than that of the Greeks, a complete reversal of his earlier positions.

Indeed, the Jewish religion is represented in 1827 as the point where the “divine” and the “natural” along with the “ideal” and the “real” were to be conceived as existing in a “unity”. As such, the natural world in Judaism was to be conceived as a “manifestation” of the divine “subject”, although this manifestation can never be adequate to that of which it is the manifestation. It is in that sense, Hegel argued, that Judaism is the religion of “sublimity”, of the unimaginable power of the divine over all else. Because of this conception, Hege also argued, Judaism was able to conceive of nature as a “prosaic” state of affairs existing in a set of lawful connections; indeed the whole concept of a “miracle”, he argued, would not have made any sense without such a conception; and thus Judaism prepared the way for the scientific treatment of nature in terms of lawfulness. Thus, in Judaism the true “miracle”  – the appearance of the spirit, Geist, in nature – is made the explicit object of reflection, and the “true” appearence of spirit as the “spirit of humanity and the human consciousness of the world” is implicitly, although not fully, brought to forth as an object of religious reflection. Indeed, in Judaism, God is seen as the “creator” of the world, not as something subject to a yet higher “necessity”, as were the Greek divinities. As created by God, the world is basically “good”; interpreted in that way, the Jewish religion is seen as laying the groundwork for something like Hegel’s speculative philosophy of nature itself. Thus by 1824, and the decisively in 1827, Hegel had completely reversed himself, conceivingin 1827 of Judaism as the first great religion of freedom, istead of the religion of servitude, the view he had taken of Judaism for almost his entire life.

Hegel was, however, clearly not fully at ease with this analysis of Judaism, since it potentially threw into question so much of his emphasis on Christianity’s claim to be the exclusively modern religion. In his final 1831 lectures on the philosophy of religion, he returned to the point about Judaism as the religion of freedom, but, much more than he had done in 1827, he stressed what he saw as its fatal internal contradictions and why it could not serve as an appropriately modern religion. Judaism remained one-sided, Hegel concluded, in the sense that it still represented the divine as a national deity; this was the basic contradiction, so Hegel thought, in Judaism, since it held that God was also the deity only of a particular, “chosen” people. Moreover, the Jewish conception of God, although sublime and deep, nonethless was still of sufficient abstractnes that “the laws do not appear as laws of reason but as prescriptions of the Lord”. Thus, divine and human law are not sufficiently differentiated, and a legal formalism remained intrinsic to the Jewish religion and way of life.” (Pinkard, Terry. p. 584-586)