“Alienation”: Judaism as the Philosophical Issue Between Hegel and Kant [1986]

As Moses Hess and Karl Marx, among others, knew only too well, Hegel was first, last, and always a philosopher of religion—indeed, a religious philosopher of religion and specifically a Christian philosopher of Christianity. (Nietzsche then called this quite rightly, and punning, “eine hinterlistige Theologie.”) For this reason, when one wishes to deal with Hegel’s philosophy of religion, one must in effect deal with all of Hegel’s work, not just, and not even primarily, with those books and lectures of his which are titularly or substantively concerned with religion. Since “alienation” is an integral, indeed, a decisive, part of his philosophy of religion, all that has just now been said about Hegel’s philosophy of religion is equally true of his doctrine of alienation.