Hegel gegen Schleiermacher. Dogmatik, Religion, Philosophie

Hegel’s dispute with Schleiermacher in Berlin concerned two disciplines: dogmatics and philosophy. In the Preface to the Philosophy of Religion by Hinrichs, as well as in his Lectures on philosophy of religion, Hegel attacked Schleiermacher’s dogmatics and tried to involve Carl Daub in that debate in order to hinder Schleiermacher’s cultural hegemony. In fact Schleiermacher played a pivotal role in the attempt at unification of the protestant Churches, and his main work of dogmatics, The Christian faith, was becoming the reference text in this process. Hegel’s idea of the tasks of philosophy for the State, which he mainly developed in Berlin, is an answer to Schleiermacher’s concept of philosophy and to his interpretation of the ancient philosophy. The disagreement on the concept of philosophy was not simply on the cultural sphere, because Schleiermacher, as a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, had succeed in dissolving the autonomy of philosohy as a science in that institution. My contribution reconstructs the proper historical circumstances for each of Hegel’s disputes, defining the theoretical unity that underlies both. That unit strictly depends on a theory of ‘objective mind’ that is fulfilled between Heidelberg and Berlin. My contribution uses as a starting point to explain what is new in the Berlin disputes, and what is a repetition of Hegel’s lecture of Schleiermacher’s Dialogues about Religion, which he had criticized at least since the Frankfurt times. Showing the relevance of the theory of ‘objective mind’ for the interpretation of the Hegelian concept of religion as a sphere of absolute mind, my contribution corrects two main mistakes of twentieth-century interpretations of Hegel: 1. Hegel doesn’t consider religion as a cultural phenomenon simply cancelled by philosophy; 2. his philosophy is not a speculative translation of Christian dogmas. The clarification of the reasons why Hegel was against Schleiermacher are therefore an attempt to remove reasons to be against Hegel's concept of religion.