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Islam and Philosophy: the Hidden Link in Spirit’s History

Ben Schewel
03/05/11

My goal in this paper is to make sense of Hegel’s sparse remarks on Islam in his
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)1 and The Philosophy of History
(History).2 Within the Lectures, I will focus primarily on Hegel’s 1824 Lectures, as it is
here that we find Hegel’s most sustained treatment of Islam within the three versions
(1824, 1827, 1831). “Sustained” may not be the right word to describe Hegel’s account
of Islam in the 1824 Lectures though, as his remarks are limited to two pages of analysis
and one passing comment elsewhere. Hegel’s most extended examination of Islam is
found in his History, though even there his analysis is limited to five pages. Given such
meager treatment, one would expect Islam to be of only minor importance within Hegel’s
philosophy. The point I hope to make here is precisely the opposite, that Islam plays an
essential role within Hegel’s account of spirit’s movement.
Religion for Hegel is concerned fundamentally with man’s separation from
himself as spirit. Hegel’s Lectures trace religion’s evolution from its earliest stage as
natural religion, in which spirit seeks to submerge itself within nature, to its culmination
in philosophical German Protestantism. Along the way Hegel treats Chinese religion,
Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Egyptian religion, Greek religion, Judaism,
Roman religion, Christianity, and, albeit briefly, Islam. Christianity is the culmination of
representational religion, insofar as it represents man’s spiritual reconciliation with
himself and God. Christianity then, is the only religion that overcomes evil, insofar as
evil is for Hegel simply man’s self-separation as spirit. It only remains for Christianity’s
content to be extrapolated by philosophy.
It is quite tempting to assume that Christianity develops the abstractive spirit
necessary for transforming representative religion into philosophy from within itself.
Yet, upon closer investigation it becomes clear that Hegel attributes the development of

1
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Volume III The Consummate
Religion. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California, 1986.
2
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover
Publications, 1956.
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this abstractive spirit to Islam, and its integration into European culture as enabling the
Enlightenment, the precursor to Hegel’s true philosophical civilization. Hegel thus
claims that Islam was the missing like in spirit’s history necessary to lift Christianity
towards philosophy. I will elucidate Hegel’s reasoning in what follows, and as his
account of religion’s movement in history centers on spirit’s self-separation and quest for
reconciliation, I will begin with a discussion of these themes, describing the emergence
of Christianity from Judaism and Roman religion, and then the rise of Islam in relation to
Christianity.
I. Evil and Reconciliation
The phenomenon of evil is for Hegel spirit’s separation from itself.3 Evil is a
necessary moment for spirit’s advance though, as by such self-separation spirit begins to
realize explicitly what it is implicitly within itself, a unified totality. It is good implicitly,
insofar as spirit is in its essence reconciled with itself, but it is evil insofar as this
reconciliation has not been made explicit. Spirit’s need is to become good explicitly,
which is to achieve reconciliation with itself in perfect self-knowledge, as spirit is that
which by definition steps outside of itself into actuality in order to eventually become
what it is implicitly. At that moment when spirit first steps outside of itself, spirit is thus
not what it ultimately should be. It is on the way to being good, and thus for the moment
it is not good, or evil. Spirit is not what it ought to be, insofar as it craves for an
actualized reconciliation with its implicit, and it is this craving precisely that leads spirit
to struggle towards its reconciliation throughout the history of religion.
In his lead up to Christianity, Hegel recounts the great roles played by Judaism
and Roman religion in advancing spirit towards reconciliation. In Judaism, the idea of
one spiritual God arises for the first time, and in relation to this one God human finitude
becomes evil.4 Having awoken to the consciousness of themselves as essentially separate
from God, the Jews experience great anguish, though this anguish cannot destroy their
finitude. The Jews are God’s chosen people, and thus they must preserve their finite
particularity in obedience to the God who makes this very particularity evil. Thus,
spirit’s infinite anguish arises in Judaism from its attempt to achieve reconciliation in a

3
Lectures, p. 295
4
Ibid. 306
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manner that by definition makes such reconciliation impossible.5 In Roman religion on

the other hand, spirit recognizes the actual world to be the source of evil, claiming man’s
rational spirit to be inwardly good. In identifying the world as the source of evil, the
Roman experiences a great unhappiness concerning all things worldly and seeks to
achieve reconciliation by submerging himself in the harmony of his own rational
thought.6 Thus, in Judaism we have the abstraction of the finite self as separated from
the one God, and in Roman religion the abstraction of the inward self as reconciled with
itself in separation from the actual world. Roman religion is thus likewise founded upon
a structure that makes spirit’s reconciliation impossible, as it abstracts the inward self
from the need to manifest itself in actuality.7 It is only Christianity that can reconcile
these abstractions and the suffering they cause through its Trinitarian God.
II. Christianity’s Development
While spirit’s inward essence has always been reconciled with itself, it is only in
Christianity that spirit becomes aware of this implicit language, albeit within the
symbolic content of representational religion. This knowledge is first spoken by Christ
and demonstrated through his life to his disciples. These disciples allow for Christ to
disclose himself as the Son of God insofar as they have faith in the sensible person of
Jesus as the Christ, as God in his self-determination within the finite world of actuality.
Because the disciples’ faith begins from an interaction with Jesus as a sensible person,
their transformation of faith moves first into representational symbolism, yielding the
divine narrative recorded in the Gospels. In essence, the movement of faith is an early
manifestation of spirit’s drive to raise the actual up to the universal, and so this symbolic
narrative faith must continue to develop into the higher conceptuality of doctrine.8
The next stage begins when the church authoritatively presents its doctrine as the
mediating medium through which divine reconciliation can be realized in every soul.
Thus, in order to enter the community one must first submit to the doctrinal authority of
the Church, afterwards assimilating this doctrine into one’s thought, and finally
participating in the community’s reconciliation through communion. Resulting from this

5
Ibid. 309
6
Ibid. 308
7
Ibid. 309
8
Ibid. 324-5
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process is the believer’s feeling of internal certainty regarding his reconciliation with
God, and thus spirit’s feeling of being reconciled with itself.
Though Christianity in one sense constitutes the manifestation of spirit’s inner
reconciliation to itself, such faith remains abstract as long is it has not become manifest
within the believers’ actual lives. Thus, Christianity must in its next stage sanctify the
world of actuality, and this process “involves the transformation of the community, its
recasting and modification.”9 This is the process by which reconciliation in faith
becomes explicit as the Kingdom of God, bringing as its final result the movement into
philosophical civilization. Hegel describes this movement of realization as proceeding
through three styles of external objectivity, to each of which it must bring actual
reconciliation. These three moments are heart, then reflection, and then the concept.
By heart [Gëmut], Hegel means the immediate external world as colored by our
private concerns. In the 1827 Lectures, Hegel describes heart as the “whole complex of
feeling” which is simultaneously “the feeling of a content and the feeling of oneself.”10
Accordingly, we do not know the world as it is shown to our heart in separation from
ourselves, but only as it appears in its emotive connection to ourselves. Though Christian
reconciliation is meant to manifest itself within the heart, the simple assimilation of
doctrine and participation in communion does not suffice for its transformation. Thus,
the heart of the believers and the world disclosed therein still stand in need of actualized
reconciliation, and the Church, as the community through whom reconciliation’s
actualization takes place, must embrace its believers in the weakness of their hearts,
struggling with the evil of their self-interest and self-separation from God. By taking up
its believers’ crude hearts into itself though, the Church falls into worldliness, corruption
and an overwhelming concern with the particular, losing for a time its universalizing
drive. It is at this point in his Lectures that Hegel moves to the second moment of
Christianity’s realization, reflection, which he describes in the 1824 Lectures as involving
Islam and Enlightenment rationalism. In order to clarify Hegel’s reasoning in so linking
Islam and Enlightenment rationalism, I will turn to Hegel’s discussion of German
Christianity and Islam in his History.
III. The German Heart

9
Ibid. 337
10
Ibid. 138
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Though he makes no reference to the Germanic peoples in his Lectures, it is clear

from his History that the term “heart” is meant primarily to signify the Germans in their
defining characteristic. There, Hegel defines heart [Gemüt] as “that undeveloped,
indeterminate totality of Spirit…in which satisfaction of soul is attained in a
corresponding and indeterminate way,” and heart in this sense is the exclusive quality of
the Germans.11 While Hegel speaks in the Lectures of heart as a complex of feelings, the
German peoples seem to be utterly unique in that their entire being and thus their entire
world functions as one large complex of feelings without any determinate purpose.
Accordingly, the German people are animated by a desire for an overall sense of
enjoyment without binding themselves to any particular object of desire.
It is their quality of heart that makes the Germans particularly suited to carry
forward the Christian principle towards its culmination. As Hegel explains, the Christian
God is the absolute object, and thus contains all determinations within himself. That
which contains all determinations within itself cannot itself be determinate, and so the
Christian God is indeterminate. God does acquire concrete determination through his
incarnation in his Son, and through his Son’s death and resurrection God remains
reconciled with himself in spirit. Thus, the Trinitarian God is the spiritual unity of
absolute indeterminacy and absolute determinacy. The Germanic peoples possess the
same structure by virtue of their quality of heart. They are determinate as a particular
people, yet the very quality of their determinate being is to be directed towards the
indeterminate as such. Hence, Hegel can claim that the “destiny of the German peoples
is, to be the bearers of the Christian principle,” as their heart is “exactly that for which we
found an appropriate application in the principle of Christianity.”12
The German heart needs to be tamed and purified though, insofar as it must relate
to God’s indeterminacy through the world of determinacy, and thus God as the universal
drawn from the worldly. In order for such a purification to take place, the German
peoples must make two movements. First, they must enter into the world with directed
interests more or less similar to those of other peoples. Second, having entered into the
world, they must then learn how to understand law and act according to principled aims,
developing thereby an abstractive spirit. Hegel explains how the Germans will enter into

11
History, p. 350
12
Ibid. 341, 351
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society through their own qualities, leading to the formation of a state, though one that is
not animated by universal cognition and thus devoid of true laws and rights.13 If we
make the connection between Hegel’s Lectures and his discussion of the German people
in his History, it becomes clear that the Church’s fall into worldliness in its attempt to
embrace the heart of its believers refers to a large extent to its conversion and
incorporation of the Germanic peoples. Hegel describes this period as one in which
“Spirit in the concrete is realized.”14
From where come spirit’s abstractive realization, then? The “purification for
developing Spirit in the abstract,” Hegel explains, is accomplished in Islam, for “while
the West began to shelter itself in a political edifice of chance, entanglement and
particularity, the very opposite direction necessarily made its appearance in the world, to
produce the balance of the totality of spiritual manifestation.”15 It is Islam that provides
German Christianity with the movement it needs to raise itself up to the pinnacle of
philosophical civilization.
IV. Islam and the Spirit of Abstraction
As Hegel remarks, Judaism is “an objective [or negative16], inward absorption
into evil,” and this negative absorption creates great anguish by forcing the Jews to
maintain their particularity. On the other hand, there is an “inward absorption of an
affirmative kind” which “is absorption into the pure unity of God.”17 This is an
absorption that is not bound to the particularity of one’s finitude, but finds in the
identification of the finite self as the source of evil the energy for the infinite task of
submerging the self in God’s transcendent oneness. This non-particular form of Judaism
is Islam. Similar to Judaism, Islam believes in one God who is a pure unity of thought,
an abstract God incapable of becoming concrete. Islam makes a significant advance
beyond Judaism though, as it breaks God’s limitation to a particular people, freeing
thereby the full energy of his abstract universality. As Hegel says, Islam “bathes in the
aether of limitlessness,” and thus its practitioners pursue the negation of their

13
Ibid. 353-4
14
Ibid. 355
15
Ibid. 355-6
16
Ibid. 306, footnote 156
17
Ibid. 306
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particularity through union with God with unprecedented vigor.18 In this regard, Islam is
clearly distinguished from Christianity for Hegel: Muhammad is a man, not God, and
God can have no concrete determinations for Muslims, being thus purely intellectual.
Accordingly spirit can never become fully free in Islam as it can in Christianity, never
achieve full reconciliation with itself. Yet, it is precisely in this lack of reconciliation that
Islam finds its dramatic energy, for better or for worse.
For the Muslims, every worldly task must be expanded towards infinity in such a
way that all its determinations are eventually abolished in union with God. Hegel
describes this movement as the struggle for “abstract worship,” and such abstract worship
cannot help but be fanatical. In fact, in his Lectures Hegel states that the “religion of
Islam is essentially fanatical,” and he again affirms this insight in his History.19 Though
fanaticism in Hegel’s usage carries at times the negative connotations we today associate
with religious fanaticism, by the term he simply means “an enthusiasm for something
abstract,” insofar as this abstract thought, being detached from concrete determination,
must carry a negative relation to all things determinate.20 Accordingly, fanaticism is
capable of both great destruction and the greatest elevation, and, in Islam, as he says,
“Never has enthusiasm…performed greater deeds.”21
Islam becomes for Hegel the very essence of fanaticism, as there has never been
before a people governed by an “all-comprehensive enthusiasm – restrained by nothing,
finding its limits nowhere, and absolutely indifferent to all beside.”22 In almost complete
opposition to the German heart, when a Muslim embraces a particular aim he embraces it
with the entirety of his soul, and it becomes his “one passion and that alone.” If he is
cruel, then he is the cruelest of all men. If he loves, then he loves with the reckless
abandon of the Sufi mystics. Hence, when the Arab Muslims begin their conquest they
triumph rapidly over a massive territory. And when they turn to scientific and
philosophical learning they pursue it with the utmost vigor, spreading the arts and
sciences nobly throughout their empire. Also in the arts, the “reckless fervor” of Islam
generates the “glowing warmth of the Arab and [Muslim] poetry” through an “absorption

18
Lectures, p. 244, footnote 215
19
Lectures, p. 243
20
History, p. 358
21
Ibid. 359
22
Ibid. 359
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in the life of its object and the sentiment it inspires, so that selfishness and egotism are
utterly banished.”23 And with the same explosion of energy, the Islamic civilization
came upon its golden age after only two hundred years. As Hegel describes this period,
Large cities arose in all parts of the empire, where commerce and manufactures
flourished, splendid palaces were built, and schools created. The learned men of
the empire assembled at the Caliph’s court, which not merely shone outwardly
with the pomp of the costliest jewels, furniture and palaces, but was resplendent
with the glory of poetry and all the sciences…The meanest [Muslim], the most
insignificant old woman approached the Caliph as his equals.24

Such glory, intellectual, aesthetic, and political, would not last long though, as
Islam’s decline soon began. The Abbasid Caliphate, the seat of high Islamic culture, was
attacked and defeated by invaders, and the Ottoman empire arose in its ashes. Whereas
the Abbasids were glorious by virtue of their reckless pursuit of all things, the Ottomans
sought to preserve stability and thereby sacrificed the fanaticism on which Islam’s
astounding achievements depended. Without such fanaticism, the Islamic civilization
was submerged into great vice, and Islam’s lack of concern for its believers’ private
domain made such vice “all the more savage and unrestrained in this case because they
lack reflection.”25 “At present,” remarks Hegel, “driven back into its Asiatic and African
quarters, and tolerated only in one corner of Europe through the jealousy of Christian
Powers, Islam has long vanished from the stage of history at large, and has retreated into
Oriental ease and repose.”26 This is not the end of Islam’s Hegelian story though.
Hegel then goes on to explain how Europeans were ennobled through their
warring interactions with the Muslim world. They learned the infinite task of abstraction
by virtue of their cultural interactions, and were thus able to idealize what valor the
Europeans possessed into “a fair and noble chivalry.”27 Even more important, with the
adoption of such an abstractive spirit, Europeans were able to receive great aesthetic
inspiration from the Muslims, influencing the likes of Goethe to push towards an ever
more liberated imagination. Most importantly of all, Europe received science and
philosophy from the Muslims.

23
Ibid. 359
24
Ibid. 359
25
Lectures, p. 243
26
History, p. 360
27
Ibid. 360
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It was, for Hegel, Islam that provided spirit with its abstractive development, and
when European Christianity assimilated this development it eventually gave birth to
Enlightenment rationality. This is why Hegel speaks of Enlightenment rationalism and
Islam the two sides of reflection’s “antithesis of the Christian Church.”28 Islam and
Enlightenment rationalism are “on par” for Hegel, in that “God has no content and is not
concrete.” The main difference between the two is that Enlightenment rationalism dwells
in abstract inwardness, manifesting a “caprice” an obsession with “its power over
everything – its power to produce objectivity, the good, and imbue it with content.”29
Islam on the other hand, dwells in the abstraction of God in an attempt to destroy
subjectivity. Regardless, it is clear from the above analyses that Enlightenment
rationalism is the echo of European Christianity’s subsumption of Islam’s abstractive
spirit, and it is only through this echo that German Christianity is raised to the level of a
philosophical state. Hegel describes this philosophical development of German
Christianity in his Lectures as the third moment of Christianity’s realization, the stage of
the concept.
V. Conclusion
I find two things most surprising about this last insight. First, just as the German
heart provided the worldly indeterminacy needed for spirit’s movement into
concreteness, it was Islamic monotheism’s relentless push through all determinacy
towards God as absolute object that generated the abstractive movement necessary to
generate European civilization. While clothed in Hegel’s particular historiography, a
historiography that I neither accept nor for which I seek to apologize, his
acknowledgement of Islam’s place in world history is remarkable, as it is only recently
that historians have begun to acknowledge Islam’s profound contributions to the
construction of the modern world. Within Hegel’s system there can be no doubt that
Islam logically holds a place just as high as that of Greece and Rome. Second, despite
the clear importance of Islam for Hegel, he covers up this aspect of his thought almost
entirely, spending page after page on seemingly ever other source of Western civilization
but for some reason breezing over Islam. What motivated Hegel to treat Islam so
strangely?

28
Lectures, p. 241
29
Ibid. 242
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To conclude, I will consider briefly four possible interpretations as to Hegel’s

motivation for his obscurely exalting approach to Islam: 1) Hegel simply did not know or
have access to as much scholarly information concerning Islam as he did with other
religions, and thus chose not to write on the subject too extensively. I find this dubitable,
as the study of Islam was by that time as well developed as the study of Hinduism,
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Chinese religion. There had been a chair of Arabic at
Cambridge since 1643; 2) as the powers of Europe and the Ottomans were still competing
at Hegel’s time, Hegel may have wanted to deemphasize Europe’s debt to Islamic
civilization; 3) Hegel may have found the radical nature of his ideas concerning Europe
and Christianity’s debt to Islam too dangerous for his career, insofar as he was already
under attack from pietists and the like for his unorthodox views of Christianity; 4)
perhaps Hegel found his insights concerning Europe’s debt to Islam unsettling in their
implications within his system, and sought to focus on other rivals to his vision of his
Germanized philosophical Europe, such as pietism. While other interpretations may be
possible, it seems to me that the answer lies somewhere in between the last three.