Jason Barton

Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) exercised a tremendous amount of influence on the philosophical compositions of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). In the following, I concern myself with a specific effect of Kant’s third Critique on Hegel’s philosophical oeuvre, namely the consequential character of Kant’s ‘reflective judgment’ for the constitution and culmination of Hegel’s mature Religionsphilosophie. In the 1827 version of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel organizes the second main division of his religious phenomenology in lockstep fashion with the organization of Kant’s third Critique, specifically in accordance with the progression through beauty, sublimity, and teleology. I contend that Hegel appropriates Kant’s arrangement (and affiliated philosophical accoutrement) in order to establish the phenomenological conditions for the possibility of Christian religious consciousness and – in particular – the third trinitarian figure of the Holy Spirit.

This book explores what G.W.F. Hegel meant by ‘God’. Was he referring to the Lutheran conception of the Christian God? Or, was he referring to a heterodox conception of God more in line with his philosophical speculations? Through a close reading of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, this book offers a detailed answer to this question. It contends that Hegel assigns two meanings to the concept of God: an inward-facing perspective and an outward-facing perspective. From the inward-facing perspective, Hegel ventured to authentically capture how world-historical religions respectively portray the divine from their own conceptual, representational, and practical positions. From the outward-facing perspective, Hegel identifies divinity with absolute spirit in its odyssey-like movement toward self-recognition. The concept of God for Hegel encompasses both of these meanings. It is argued that one cannot approximate an accurate comprehension of Hegel’s ‘God’ without analyzing divine revelation. In contrast to previous books, this book firmly grounds Hegel’s religious phenomenology in historical and logical factors. Through such a grounding, A Hegelian Theory of Divine Revelation attempts to achieve a clarified understanding of the character of Hegelian divine revelation and ultimately a clarified understanding of Hegel’s concept of God. This book is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of German idealism and of the philosophy of religion, especially those focusing on the thought of G.W.F. Hegel.

The established scholarly perspective on the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Neoplatonic metaphysics is underdeveloped. This perspective asserts that Schelling consistently distances himself from the emanation-based framework of Neoplatonism along with its construction of matter (ὕλη) as completely passive, purely potential, and spectrally obscure. Such a hermeneutic emerges from a close reading of Schelling’s 1794 Timaeus commentary as well as his 1811–1815 Weltalter drafts. I mark my intervention at the temporal midpoint of this range (1804–1806), namely during the final throes of Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie. At this point in Schelling’s intellectual itinerary, he discloses a proximity between his conceptual configuration of matter (die Materie) and the aforementioned, Neoplatonic conceptual configuration of matter. Insofar as heretofore erudition has overlooked the denouement of Schelling’s early philosophical phase, it has also neglected Schelling’s coquettish attitude toward Neoplatonism and its ontological destitution of matter. I intend to highlight the overlap between these respective approaches.

The minutiae of F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie have been perennially dismissed due to its allegedly infeasible and indefensible assertions about Nature, such as his designation of Nature as “universal organism.” In the realm of post-Kantian German Idealism, such a dismissive attitude toward Schelling’s so-called objective idealism, more often than not, develops itself along the lines of Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s conception of the Absolute (i.e., as static, fixed, undifferentiated, dull, and so on). In turn, I aim to accomplish two tasks in the following investigation. First, I intend to clarify Schelling’s characterization of Nature as universal organism through a practical or teleological, instead of a theoretical or metaphysical, approach. Second, I seek to undermine the Hegelian-influenced criticisms of Schelling’s “Absolute” by demonstrating the ways in which the practico-teleological characterization of Schelling’s formulation of Nature extends into his later philosophical works (i.e., his Identitätsphilosophie and his Freiheitsschrift). Through these clarifications, I hope to emphasize the uniqueness and richness of Schelling’s configuration of Nature.

Initiated almost 200 years ago, the accusation that G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy qualifies as Gnostic has stood the test of time. Beginning with Ferdinand Christian Baur’s 1835 Die christliche Gnosis, thinkers have attempted to inextricably bind Hegel’s philosophical endeavors to the ancient form(s) of religious knowledge production known as ‘Gnosticism’. Two additional figures have surfaced more recently who also champion the Gnostic accusation, namely Eric Voegelin and James Lindsay. Voegelin’s 1968 Science, Politics, and Gnosticism as well as his 1972 ‘On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery’ seek to justify and legitimize the Gnostic accusation in unequivocal terms. Lindsay’s 2022 best-seller, Race Marxism, further perpetuates the charge of Gnosticism against Hegel. I aim to deal with each of these figures and their respective accusations in reverse chronological order, demonstrating how each of them must artificially construct Hegel as a Gnostic in order to successfully defend their accusations.

In this paper, I elaborate a Derridean deconstruction of law through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Derrida only focuses on jurisprudential law enforcement in his famous ‘Force of Law’ lecture, leaving corporeal law enforcement untouched. In turn, I explore the irresolvable conceptual tensions within corporeal law enforcement from the standpoints of (a) individuals rationalizing their obedience to law enforcement and (b) the legal system rationalizing its circumscription of acceptable law enforcement. To support my analysis, I examine landmark court cases and their deleterious effects on accountability for law enforcers. In particular, I track the progression from the legal standard of ‘shock of conscience’ (i.e., established by Rochin v. California (1952)) to that of ‘objective reasonableness’ (i.e., established by Graham v. Connor (1989)), which reinforces the legal protections for and libidinal features of police brutality. In this sense, I seek to clarify the dimensions of the libidinal economy belonging to policy brutality, namely its components of sadism and superegoic enjoyment.