The religious foundations of Hegel's ethical thought (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)

It is commonly held that G. W. F. Hegel interprets religion to be transcended by philosophical thinking, on the one hand, or by a secular system of ethical life, on the other hand. In disputing both, this project argues that for Hegel, religion continues to be a valid and living force for modern people. Sittlichkeit is Hegel's vision of a modern convergence of religion and ethics. Religion is our representation of the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit, and ethical life is the objective expression of how any historical culture lives that self-understanding. Religion and ethics converge again in modernity because Spirit has matured in modernity on both counts, realizing subjective freedom through moral agency and knowing the spiritual infinity of human subjectivity.; As to how religion is indeed valid, this study examines Hegel's definition of religion as a human speculative representation of the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit and develops a religious view and a philosophical view of this definition. The religious view explores the content of religion as the biography of God, which is revealed to be also an autobiography, and develops Hegel's theology of God's full self-revelation to human reason in Christianity. The philosophical view of the speculative definition of religion develops Hegel's metaphysical realism that takes up Spirit (Geist) as absolute Idea which realizes itself concretely in the institutions that define human life. Hegel has re-established metaphysics, or the study of the true Absolute, within a realism that sees that Absolute as dynamically living and becoming within a human frame of reference. Understanding ethical and political life as the truly religious task for moderns, and not just a secularized, watered down religiosity, yields the most accurate picture of Hegel's metaphysical realism. With the convergence of religion and ethics in modernity, this study intends to yield a fuller picture of Hegel's views on religion and on ethics, where other attempts have taken an exclusively empirical approach and ignored the metaphysical aspect of Hegel's philosophy of Spirit or have taken a theological route that fails to see that Hegelian metaphysics inhabits the here and now.