Transition: From Theodicy to the Questioning of God
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Christian theologies – Protestant as well as Catholic – wrestled with Hegel over the right mediation of God and history, transcendence and immanence. Their question was: how can one take up Hegel’s insights without dissolving the personal God into an anonymous world process?
The following chapter poses a more radical question. For Jewish thinkers after 1945, it was no longer a matter of the right mediation of God and history – but of whether such a mediation is even conceivable at all after Auschwitz. If “the actual is rational” – what does that mean in view of the extermination camps? If “world history is the world court of judgment” – what verdict does it pronounce on six million murdered?
The thinkers we now treat – Levinas, Jonas, Fackenheim, Buber – are not theologians in the confessional sense. They are philosophers who think out of Jewish experience and tradition. But precisely for this reason they pose the question of Hegel more sharply than the Christian theologians: not as an academic problem of systemic architecture, but as an existential question about the possibility of meaning as such.
Here a paradoxical structure emerges: the more radically these thinkers reject Hegel, the more Hegelian their arguments become. The critique of totality makes use of dialectical figures. The “no” to Hegel is itself a determinate “no” – and thus, as Hegel would have shown, a moment of the movement.