What Is Missing: Systematic Mediation
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
For all appreciation of Küng’s achievement, limits remain. Three should be named.
First, the presentation is too harmonious. Küng emphasizes the commonalities so strongly that the genuine conflicts between and within the religions sometimes remain underlit. What about religions whose core seems to be exclusivism? What about traditions unwilling to acknowledge the equality of the sexes?
Second, mediation toward concrete practice is insufficient. How does one get from abstract principles to concrete decisions? This level of mediation – what Hegel calls “reflective judgment” – is largely missing in Küng.
Third, the justification remains theological. Küng argues from within the religious tradition. But what about secular people? Can they share the global ethic without being religious? Küng says yes – but he does not systematically show what a philosophical-performative justification independent of religion would look like.
The performative derivation we have developed elsewhere can supplement this: the Golden Rule is philosophically justifiable as an explication of what everyone already does when they argue. Whoever argues expects recognition – and must therefore grant it to others as well. The religious traditions discovered this structure and translated it into their respective languages. Philosophy can explicate it without needing to fall back on religion.
Küng’s achievement is the empirical-historical demonstration of the convergence. The philosophical justification must be added. Both together – the empirical finding and the systematic justification – yield a strong argument for the universality of basic ethical structures.