Academic literature on the topic 'Christianity and existentialism'

Specificity of Shestov’s interpretation of existentialtheological views of Kierkegaard. This article reveals the problem of understanding of Soren Kierkegaard’s specific religious existentialism by Lev Shestov. The author argues that Shestov failed to adequately understand the Kierkegaard’s indirect discursive method. Therefore, Shestov is inadmissible interpretation of Kierkegaard of canonical Christianity.

abstract: The essay examines the historical role of an important yet largely forgotten work, namely, Hans Jonas's 1934 Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, Part 1: Mythological Gnosticism , the major project of his early philosophical career. The essay suggests that this early work should be understood not only as a preliminary stage of a debate that will reach fruition later, but as it addresses some of the fundamental problems in nineteenth-century German thought, namely the problem of dualism. More specifically, the essay suggests seeing Jonas's early work as part of the history of German thought as it depicts a transition from German Romanticism to Existentialism, making innovative use of two of the most salient terms of nineteenth-century German philosophy, the "symbol" and the "myth."

Happiness, life and liberty are central terms in the history of philosophy. At the same time, they belong to the core of Christianity. We find these key terms already in the New Testament and we also find that reflections on these terms have defined their meanings in new ways throughout the centuries. I show the way how the original meanings have gradually changed. In contemporary reflections, we find interesting attempts to reform the traditional meanings, in which the influence of the natural sciences and twentieth century philosophies (such as phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism and post-modernism) have proven to be decisive. Christianity-oriented philosophies in contemporary academia, such as those of Michel Henry or Jean-Luc Marion, offer versions of these thoughts. The main defect of the traditional understandings may be seen simply their isolationist approach, that is to say, their approach to consider these terms as unrelated to one another. My own solution finds the common structure in the reality of revelation and considers life, liberty, and happiness as moments only insufficiently grasped by traditional approaches.

The subject of this research is the psychoanalytic theory of religion and the evolution of its interpretation of Christianity. The dynamics of theoretical development is represented by three main epochs of development. First, it is worth considering the prerequisites from which psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic theory of religion originated. In Western Christian culture, the intellectual thought of the XIX–XX centuries is fueled by the Enlightenment era, the philosophy of the “death of God” and scientific progress. But psychoanalysis is initially in a twofold position: it exposes primitive ideas about religion, and at the same time there is a lot of evidence that the symbolism and revelations of intuition embedded in the Judeo-Christian religion are included in its structure. The next milestone is the reign of existentialism and the development of postmodern thought. The understanding of the spiritual aspects of the human subject is significantly deepened. Psychoanalytic thinking about religion perceives existential intuitions and turns out to be an ally of Christianity. Finally, the third stage, when by the beginning of the XXI century there is a characteristic request of the New Time for the transformation of previous knowledge about religion and religiosity, from the side of psychoanalysis there are a number of important discoveries about the subject. The dialogue of religions and psychoanalysis is becoming extremely relevant and, as this study shows, modern psychoanalysis has worthy answers to the problem of Christianity in the post-Christian (secular) world. The research is based on the theory of religion, in addition to the theory of Freud, by such authors as G. Bataille, J.Lacan, Y.Kristeva, as well as modern psychoanalytic developments in the field of studying the reality of a religious subject, presented on the intellectual scene over the past decades. In conclusion, conclusions are given regarding the general discourse of psychoanalysis and Christianity.

The article’s objective is to illustrate the need for a deeper analysis and interpretation of Todos Osmachka’s epic of the 40s and 50s of the XX century as a text in which national world-view constants accumulate. A sharp ideological and political confrontation with the aggression of Moscow, presented in the text of the Osmachka as a diachronic imprint of the national history of the Soviet-Stalinist regime, reveals the essence of the patriot-artist. The existence of the Ukrainian man, as well as the nation in general, is the only one possible within the framework of God’s world, subject to the observance of the canonical and Christian virtues and, foremost, in an active national patriotic position. The linguistic, ideologically political textual and context reading of Todos Osmachka’s artistic prose clearly manifests the genesis of the Ukrainian mentality of the author himself. For Todos Osmachka, Ukraine was the basis of all of his work, the imperative and the fundamental concentration of all creative and ideologically political meanings. Actually, the core of the national entity existence is the creative essence of Osmatchka’s prose. In the person of Todos Osmachka – the poet, prose writer, translator, philosopher – there can be seen one of those infrequent cases when, unlike western existentialists, the aesthetic-philosophical concept was not only of a frame of mind declaration kind, and manifested but at the level of author’s prosaic and poetic texts, but it also found an uncompromising and consecutive embodiment in his personal life. After the existential moduses in Osmachka’s prose have been allocated and interpreted, there frequently arises the already noticed in the literature study thought an essential issue of distinction between the specificity of the western (European) existentialism, that concentrates on the existential problems of a separate, often denationalized, individual, and the Ukrainian existentialism, which manifests itself at the “outlook-mental” level and displays a specific “existential- boundary” world view of the Ukrainian, considering and explicating the existential problems of a person first of all through the national ontology prism.An attempt at positioning the author as a Christological writer, for whom Christianity as a measurement of spirituality was one of the priority concepts of a national-ideological position.

Интерес к историческим проблемам, появившийся в богословской мысли, относительно недавно, заставляет ставить вопрос о соотношении богословия и истории. В частности, не заключается ли в «историзации» богословия опасность релятивизации вечной христианской истины? Протоиерей Георгий Флоровский считает, что не только возможно, но и следует богословствовать исторически, однако историческое мышление богослова должно быть просвещено светом откровения. В такой перспективе центральным событием является Боговоплощение, и это создает принципиально иное, по сравнению с античным, историческое ви́дение - персоналистическое понимание истории. Здесь Флоровский сближается с Бердяевым, развивавшим аналогичную концепцию. Напротив, философский экзистенциализм, в отличие от христианского, в лице, например, К. Ясперса, рассматривая Рождество Иисуса Христа как рядовое локальному событию, оказывается, скорее, «рецидивом эллинизма». The interest in historical problems, relatively recently emerged in theology, poses the question of relationships between theology and history. In particular, does «historization» of theology conceal the danger of relativization of the eternal Truth of Christianity? Fr. Georges Florovsky believes that one not only should, but must do theology in a historical manner. However, historical thinking of a theologian must be enlightened with the light of Revelation. In this perspective the Incarnation of God becomes the central event, and this creates a vision of history substantially different from the one of antiquity - the personalistic understanding of history. Here Florovsky comes close to Berdyaev, who developed a similar conception. Philosophical existentialism, though, e. g. Karl Jaspers, as opposed to Christian existentialism, considers the Birth of Jesus Christ as an ordinary local event, and thus becomes rather «a relapse into pre-Christian Hellenism».

The philosophical works of F. Rosenzweig have particular meaning for both academic and existential inquiries and interests, as he deeply re-observes the religious life of Judaism and Christianity through the reflection of human existence. Fear of death, observation of Plato’s understanding of Eros, overcoming of atheism of Goethe in the experience of faith - these key motives form a challenging discourse of Rosenzweig’s theological and philosophical thought, which invites reader into a truly charming spiritual journey. The article provides an intriguing introduction to the issue of RUDN Journal of Philosophy , which is dedicated to F. Rosenzweig and provides a scope to various aspects of the philosophy of one of the most prominent German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, including topics such as criticism and reception of German idealism and existentialism, «new thinking» as a philosophical system, philosophical interpretation of biblical texts, Kabbalah and mysticism.

The article deals with the problem of Nikolai Berdyaev’s reception and interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. We attempt to reconstruct Berdyaev’s attitude to the creative heritage of the great German philosopher. The phenomenon of Nietzsche was mainly perceived by the Russian philosophy of the early 20th century in a religious context. For Berdyaev himself, the personality of Nietzsche became one of the starting points for comprehending the existential dialectic of human destiny in the world historical process. In Nietzsche’s works, Berdyaev was first of all captivated by the eschatological theme the philosopher addressed, his striving for the end and the limit. Berdyaev called Nietzsche the greatest phenomenon of modern history, dialectically completing the humanistic anthropology of the West. The Russian philosopher viewed Nietzsche as the forerunner of a new religious anthropology, a religious prophet of the West, making a return to the old European humanism no longer possible. Berdyaev was convinced of the need to overcome and internalize the spiritual experience of Nietzsche. The latter opens up the prospect of transition to a new anthropological era, in which human existence must be justified by creativity. Berdyaev viewed creativity as a new religious revelation of Christianity, not manifested in patristic tradition and historical Christianity. In creative acts, man overcomes objectification as a fallen state of the world. The article examines the key ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy through the prism of religious existentialism and personalism of Berdyaev. Berdyaev’s attitude to Nietzsche was ambivalent: on the one hand, he highly appreciated how radically the German philosopher formulated the problem of a person’s creativity; on the other hand, he viewed the anti-Christian concept of the superman, leading to human godhood, as absolutely unacceptable for Russian religious philosophy and Christianity. Berdyaev assessed the new revelation of Nietzsche about the superman and the will to power as false and demonic, radically contradicting the foundations of Christian anthropology about man and the religious ethics of creativity.

The separatism that represents the challenge existing between reason and revelation is a distinctive feature of the Western intellectual heritage. This separatism arose from the concept of conceptualizing existential convergence, which enables philosophers to use standards of judgment to measure the outcomes of both reason and revelation. This existential convergence leads to the equality of fields. Cognitivism, and subjecting judgments to criteria or standards like this is in fact a declaration of the true sovereignty of reason, which led to man becoming the focus of Western philosophy, the dialectic of (Locke) that most knowledge comes from experience, and the hypothesis of (Kent) that knowledge A joint product of the mind and the external world, and the certainty of (Auguste Comte) which focuses on the scientific stage as opposed to the metaphysical and theological stages, and the experimental radicalism of (William James) are all many ideas stemming from the cognitive foundations presented by Aristotle’s empirical doctrine and keeping pace with human-centered knowledge. The approximation of the levels of existentialism stemming from the syncretic atmosphere of the Roman era, which was an essential element in Christianity, was gradually subjected to the two systems. Hume’s interpretation of God as the spirit of the material world, Hobbesian materialism in metaphysics, the theory of thought (the Absolute, the specific deity), and James’s idea of finiteness. Thinking are all exciting stages of formulating the cognitively specific existential theory of the Western heritage, which established a new model (Ihsanoglu, 2000, 122).

In this paper, we critically examine the scriptural images of heaven as captured in the Abrahamic religions from the existentialist perspective. The three dominant Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam opine that there is life beyond this earthly existence for all human beings and that God (their object of worship) has prepared a special place of eternal happiness for those who obey His commands on earth. This place is frequently referred to as the Kingdom of God, Heaven or Paradise. We argue that the above construct of heaven throws up a lot of problems, especially from the existentialist perspective. Some of these problems include the fact that these constructs of heaven eliminate all the challenges that stimulate human existentiality, throw into oblivion the scourging evils of boredom arising from the eternal passivity of existence in heaven and fail to lay down exactly the political structure and the legal status of the earthlings in heaven since a Kingdom presupposes a feudalist structure where there are kings, lords and serfs. We conclude by showing that the scriptures‘ constructs of heaven appear self-contradictory and fail to strike a chord with the contemporary image of the ideal society when perused from the existentialist perspective and should, therefore, be discarded.

Thesis (M.A. in English) -- University of Dayton.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed 06/23/10). Advisor: Albino Carrillo. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-75). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center.

Dans le chapitre du Contrat social consacré à la mort du corps politique, Rousseau rappelle que cette mort est « la pente naturelle et inévitable des Gouvernements les mieux constitués ». En effet, poursuit-il, « si Sparte et Rome ont péri, quel État peut espérer de durer toujours ? Si nous voulons former un établissement durable, ne songeons donc point à le rendre éternel ». Malgré l’avertissement de Rousseau, la tendance à rendre l’ordre politique éternel semble être un phénomène constant, jusqu’à nos jours. En témoigne l’idée d’une « fin de l’histoire » résultant de l’alliance du capitalisme et de la démocratie libérale, ou d’un modèle occidental se comprenant comme la réalisation du seul but de l’histoire, à laquelle ne s’opposeraient que des puissances « retardatrices ». À travers ces phénomènes se manifeste une « politique du temps », un discours de légitimation de l’ordre politique donnant un sens politique à sa dimension temporelle.Compris de cette manière, le problème que pose la « politique du temps » ne peut être abordé par une critique limitée à ses derniers avatars, telle la thèse de la fin de l’histoire. Il est au contraire nécessaire de remonter à la racine du problème, c’est-à-dire à la place qu’occupe cette question au sein du rapport entre temps et politique. Si la politique du temps s’avère aussi tenace, c’est en effet parce qu’elle s’inscrit dans un questionnement intrinsèquement lié à l’ordre politique, confronté à la nécessité d’assurer son « être-dans-le-temps ». La politique du temps répond à cette nécessité par une politisation du temps et de l’histoire pouvant conduire, dans sa forme extrême, à une éternisation de l’ordre politique, qui prétend alors englober la totalité du temps, du passé au futur.Compte tenu de la persistance de cette conception temporelle de l’ordre politique, de même qu’il ne suffit pas de limiter la critique à ses avatars actuels, de même serait-il impropre de la diriger contre sa seule forme extrême, dans la mesure où ce sont précisément certains discours proclamant la fin des idéologies qui tendent à reproduire aujourd’hui les structures de la politique du temps. Par conséquent, ce n’est qu’en abordant dans son ensemble le problème formé par la atemporalisation du politique et la politisation du temps qu’il est possible d’attaquer à la racine ce type de discours de légitimation, sous toutes ses formes.Pour mener à bien ce projet, deux objectifs complémentaires, correspondant aux deux fils directeurs de l’analyse, sont traités en parallèle. D’une part, nous proposons de systématiser la question du temps politique afin de montrer les grands traits communs aux phénomènes qui s’y rattachent et quelles directions s’ouvrent à la critique. Le second axe de lecture met l’accent sur les œuvres d’Eric Voegelin et de Karl Löwith en tant qu’elles apportent une contribution décisive tant à la systématisation du problème que, surtout, à son dépassement.Notre hypothèse de départ est que Löwith et Voegelin eux-mêmes sont conscients de la relation problématique entre temps et politique et cherchent, par l’intermédiaire de la dimension temporelle, à aborder un problème politique dont l’importance s’explique non seulement par la situation historique à laquelle ils sont directement confrontés, mais aussi par sa valeur systématique intrinsèque, en tant qu’il représente une évolution de la conception du politique. Tous deux sont convaincus de la nécessité de surmonter le nihilisme et l’absence de toute fondation durable en tant que tels, c’est-à-dire de surmonter la temporalisation radicale de l’ordre politique, mais également les tentatives visant à l’éterniser. C’est dans ce cadre que prennent sens leurs projets, qui cherchent à dissocier le politique et le temps et, en repensant leur relation, à éviter que tout point de référence permanent ne soit dissout par le cours du temps sans toutefois produire une éternité artificielle et absolue
In the chapter of the Social Contract on the death of the body politic, Rousseau emphasizes that its death is “the natural and inevitable propensity even of the best constituted governments”. Indeed, he continues, “if Sparta and Rome have perished, what state can hope to last for ever? If we want the constitution we have established to endure, let us not seek, therefore, to make it eternal”. Despite Rousseau’s warning, the tendency to make the political order eternal seems to be a pervasive phenomenon even in our time, as can be seen in the idea of an “end of history” that results from the combination of capitalism and liberal democracy, or in a Western model conceived as the realisation of the sole aim of history that only “delaying” powers would resist. These are examples of a “politics of time”, a concept that refers to a type of discourse contributing to the legitimization of the political order by giving a political meaning to its temporal dimension. Understood in this way, the problem of the “politics of time” cannot be addressed by focusing only on its recent developments, such as the “end of history” thesis, it is also crucial to understand these developments in the broader context of the relation between time and politics. Consequently, only a fundamental critique can put an end to the “politics of time”. The origin of the persistence of the “politics of time” has to be traced back to an essential problem that the political order is facing, namely the necessity to ensure its existence in time. The “politics of time” answers this problem by politicizing time and history, which can lead, in its most extreme form, to an eternisation of the political order that pretends to last for all time.Considering that this temporal conception of the political order is still widely present in many contemporary discourses, it would be insufficient to limit the critique to contemporary phenomena or to the extreme forms of the politics of time in modern ideologies, since precisely some proclamations of the end of ideologies tend to repeat the structure of the politics of time. It is therefore necessary to tackle the problem of the temporalisation of politics and politicisation of time as a whole. This is the only way to question the different occurrences of this kind of legitimising discourse.To achieve this, this study has two parallel aims. First, I begin by reconstructing a systematic account of the question of political time in order to highlight the main characteristics of the phenomena that are related to it. My second aim is to analyse Eric Voegelin’s and Karl Löwith’s works regarding their contribution to the systematisation of the problem, but first and foremost insofar as they offer an answer to it.Central to this work is the claim that Löwith and Voegelin not only develop a theory of the problematic relation between time and politics, but also defend a solution to tackle this problem. This problem, as they see it, is not restricted to their particular historical situation but remains of interest as an evolution of the concept of the political itself. Both Löwith and Voegelin are convinced that nihilism and the lack of any durable foundation must be overcome as such or, in other words, that it is necessary to overcome not only the temporalisation of the political order but also the attempts to “eternalise” it. The meaning and significance of Löwith’s and Voegelin’s projects appear clearly in this framework, as they can be seen as two attempts to dissociate the political from the temporal and, by reworking this relation, to prevent the relativisation of any durable foundation in the flow of time without, however, creating an artificial and absolute eternity

The work is divided into two chapters. In the first one the World's and Czech poets (chosen on the basis of Orten's list of reading) are analyzed. Those authors could be understood as impersonators or predecessors of the existential tendencies and it's provable Orten knew their works well (i.a. Rilke, Rimbaud, Akhmatova, Mácha, Weiner, Halas, Holan, Zahradníček, Bonn and Daniel). The second and more voluminous chapter consists of the motives' and topics' analysis of Orten's literary work, focused mainly on the poetry and less on the other literary genres - notes, letters, prose. The most of his poems and notes is based on the factual life experience and their ethos is founded on both existential and Christian moral philosophy. There's also an influence of some other intellectual tendencies and artistic styles like folk literature, romanticism, impressionism, less intensively expressionism, naturalism, psychoanalysis, surrealism and naturism. To get the coherent interpretation of Orten's work it's necessary to reflect (beside the existential motives) the pathos of the intimate traumatic relationship to the father, the girl(friend)s and the unborn child as well as the deeply Christian understanding of reality (connected with the biblical /The Old Testament/ dialogical relation to the God, the...

Francis Schaeffer presented a Christian world and life-view encompassing the totality of reality as an alternative to a fragmented view of reality. Refinements of dualism are examined from within a theological context giving substance to his understanding of modern world and life-view trends. Dualisms may be traced from the dawn of history of religion. It was Thomas Aquinas who profoundly influenced Western thought into a secular compartment through a synthesis of Christian dogma with Aristotelian presuppositions. The reign of the sacred diminished and a predominantly secular pathway may be traced through disciplines such as philosophy, arts, science and theology. This dissertation suggests that a dualistic analysis of reality is limited in its application. A model is suggested which traces all of reality to its ultimate source, God. The Fall brought about a dialectic which is found within the totality of a Christian world and life-view.
Philosophy, Practical & Sytematic Theology
M. Th. (Systematic Theology.

Abstract Finally, Løgstrup accuses Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and human existence of being fundamentally Platonistic because it devalues finitude and immediacy in favour of an idealized transcendence, which human beings can only achieve through dying away from finitude through suffering. He acknowledges that there are differences, such as Platonism’s focus on knowledge as opposed to Kierkegaard’s focus on action; but he also accuses Kierkegaard of overemphasizing this difference. He connects this critique with Kantian idealism and with Hegel. Furthermore, Løgstrup compares Kierkegaard’s idealism with Bertrand Russell’s empiricism through a discussion of the self. Like Kierkegaard, Russell rejects the notion of a substantial self, but where Kierkegaard’s reason for doing so is ethico-religious, Russell’s rejection is based in empiricism and science. Nevertheless, this shows how existentialism and empiricism share central views, and this provides an explanation for why positivism, empiricism, and existentialism are so prevalent in the middle of the twentieth century.

There is a brief discussion of Pascal’s affinities with existentialism. One of these concerns his denial that we can infer moral norms from human nature as it is. Our attitude to human nature will largely condition how we react to his philosophy. His arguments for Christian belief are to a certain extent detachable from his particular version of Augustinian theology. He remains relevant partly because we cannot escape confronting human nature as a problem and because he insists on the liberating potential of Christianity. He functions still as a witness to his faith.

Following the 1968 protests, the once-popular Marxism of Althusser declined in relevance. ‘French philosophy today: competing ambitions’ looks at the careers of Althusser’s pupils and successors. Much of twentieth-century French philosophy was a reckoning with phenomenology, which itself had risen as an alternative to existentialism. Some writers worried that phenomenology, as interpreted by Michael Henry and Emmanuel Levinas, was taking an overly theological turn. French philosophers were ready to move on from the Revolution, but ideas about who conferred power in the absence of a religious authority were as relevant as ever and harked back to the ongoing dialogue between philosophy and Christianity.

This chapter traces the prehistory of the subtle body, developing out of late antique Neoplatonic conceptions of the ochema-pneuma, “vehicles of the soul,” which bear souls from one incarnation to the next. It goes through the entire history of late antique Neoplatonism surveying how major thinkers engaged with and formulated ideas about these soul-bearing vehicles, from the mystical existentialism of Porphyry and Iamblichus (third century) to the detailed and philosophically sophisticated descriptions of Damascius and John Philoponus (sixth century). It ends with the ascendance of Christianity for which this notion was no longer useful, jettisoning the subtle body and sending the idea into a thousand-year slumber.

Kierkegaard’s work was shaped by his perception of modern culture as tending toward a kind of forgetfulness of what it means to be human. He discerned this tendency in modern philosophy, especially in the post-Kantian German tradition. He sought to expose as illusory any idea that we can come to understand the whole of reality from no particular point of view: in Hegel’s terms, from the standpoint of ‘pure thought’ (see also Hegel). For Kierkegaard, forgetfulness of what it means to be human also manifests itself in modern forms of putatively ethical and religious life. He perceived that Christianity, in particular, had lost its grip on people as a way of life, while persisting in a shallow form: institutionalized, notional, conformist. Offered in a spirit of opposition to system-building, Kierkegaard’s texts are often fragmentary, funny and lyrical, rich in examples, intimate in tone. They draw widely from Ancient Philosophy and the Classics, as well as from Biblical and Christian sources. They are in general more concerned to articulate difficulties than to proffer easy solutions. They nonetheless brim with ideas and insights. In philosophy, Kierkegaard’s influence is most clearly marked in the later traditions of phenomenology and existentialism and in the philosophy of religion (see also Existentialism). In theology and religious studies, his work has been taken up from a wide range of perspectives: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, liberal, conservative, Buddhist, Taoist. Secular authors have also found much in his work to appreciate. The breadth of his influence – in philosophy and theology but also in literature and film, in sociology, psychology and psychotherapy – attests to the power of his work to cut across traditional boundaries.

As an intellectual tradition, the history of Hegelianism is the history of the reception and influence of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. This tradition is notoriously complex and many-sided, because while some Hegelians have seen themselves as merely defending and developing his ideas along what they took to be orthodox lines, others have sought to ‘reform’ his system, or to appropriate individual aspects and overturn others, or to offer consciously revisionary readings of his work. This makes it very hard to identify any body of doctrine common to members of this tradition, and a wide range of divergent philosophical views can be found among those who (despite this) can none the less claim to be Hegelians. There are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons for this: on one hand, Hegel’s position itself brings together many different tendencies (idealism and objectivism, historicism and absolutism, rationalism and empiricism, Christianity and humanism, classicism and modernism, a liberal view of civil society with an organicist view of the state); any balance between them is hermeneutically very unstable, enabling existing readings to be challenged and old orthodoxies to be overturned. On the other hand, the critical response to Hegel’s thought and the many attempts to undermine it have meant that Hegelians have continually needed to reconstruct his ideas and even to turn Hegel against himself, while each new intellectual development, such as Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology or existential philosophy, has brought about some reassessment of his position. This feature of the Hegelian tradition has been heightened by the fact that Hegel’s work has had an impact at different times over a long period and in a wide range of countries, so that divergent intellectual, social and historical pressures have influenced its distinct appropriations. At the hermeneutic level, these appropriations have contributed greatly to keeping the philosophical understanding of Hegel alive and open-ended, so that our present-day conception of his thought cannot properly be separated from them. Moreover, because questions of Hegel interpretation have so often revolved around the main philosophical, political and religious issues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegelianism has also had a significant impact on the development of modern Western thought in its own right. As a result of its complex evolution, Hegelianism is best understood historically, by showing how the changing representation of Hegel’s ideas have come about, shaped by the different critical concerns, sociopolitical conditions and intellectual movements that dominated his reception in different countries at different times. Initially, Hegel’s influence was naturally most strongly felt in Germany as a comprehensive, integrative philosophy that seemed to do justice to all realms of experience and promised to preserve the Christian heritage in a modern and progressive form within a speculative framework. However, this position was quickly challenged, both from other philosophical standpoints (such as F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’ and F.A. Trendelenburg’s neo-Aristotelian empiricism), and by the celebrated generation of younger thinkers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and the early Karl Marx), who insisted that to discover what made Hegel a truly significant thinker (his dialectical method, his view of alienation, his ‘sublation’ of Christianity), this orthodoxy must be overturned. None the less, both among these radicals and in academic circles, Hegel’s influence was considerably weakened in Germany by the 1860s and 1870s, while by this time developments in Hegelian thought had begun to take place elsewhere. Hegel’s work was known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and (somewhat later) Britain, each with their own distinctive line of interpretation, but all fairly uncritical in their attempts to assimilate his ideas. However, in each of these countries challenges to the Hegelian position were quick to arise, partly because the influence of Hegel’s German critics soon spread abroad, and partly because of the growing impact of other philosophical positions (such as Neo-Kantianism, materialism and pragmatism). Nevertheless, Hegelianism outside Germany proved more durable in the face of these attacks, as new readings and approaches emerged to counter them, and ways were found to reinterpret Hegel’s work to show that it could accommodate these other positions, once the earlier accounts of Hegel’s metaphysics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion (in particular) were rejected as too crude. This pattern has continued into the twentieth century, as many of the movements that began by defining themselves against Hegel (such as Neo-Kantianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, post-structuralism and even ‘analytic’ philosophy) have then come to find unexpected common ground, giving a new impetus and depth to Hegelianism as it began to be assimilated within and influenced by these diverse approaches. Such efforts at rapprochement began in the early part of the century with Wilhelm Dilthey’s attempt to link Hegel with his own historicism, and although they were more ambivalent, this connection was reinforced in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The realignment continued in France in the 1930s, as Jean Wahl brought out the more existentialist themes in Hegel’s thought, followed in the 1940s by Alexander Kojève’s influential Marxist readings. Hegelianism has also had an impact on Western Marxism through the writings of the Hungarian Georg Lukács, and this influence has continued in the critical reinterpretations offered by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. More recently, most of the major schools of philosophical thought (from French post-structuralism to Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy) have emphasized the need to take account of Hegel, and as a result Hegelian thought (both exegetical and constructive) is continually finding new directions.

Jean-Luc Nancy has developed, expanded and reimagined the general project of deconstructing Western philosophy. His early writings, some of which were written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, largely consist of careful analyses of major philosophers and writers, ranging from Plato to Blanchot. By combining deconstructive readings with modes of inquiry associated with French phenomenological and existentialist traditions, Nancy argues in a variety of contexts that being is always being-in-common. The task of philosophy lies in rethinking the commonality of being, without relying on any prior conception of identity, unity or wholeness. ‘Being-in-common’ means that nothing – no substance, no identifiable trait – is held in common. The absence of a common substance or unitary identity does not then generate a command to make up for this lack by means of socially useful work. As the exposure of each singularity to its ungrounded commonality, ‘being-in-common’ is the surprising ‘fact’ upon which Nancy’s investigations into philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and political phenomena are generally oriented. Nancy’s later writings expand on his reflections on being-in-common in several, often surprising directions, beginning with studies of corporeality and tactility, which lead him to the ‘deconstruction of Christianity.’ Some of his most trenchant writings intervene in contemporary political and philosophical controversies, such as, most recently, reflections on globalization and the scandal of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism.