Browsing by Subject "Hegel"

Herbert Marcuse's early essays and reviews written while under the tutelage of Martin Heidegger continue to suffer a poor reception. Even the most sympathetic of his critics widely focus on either his deviations from existing Marxist orthodoxy, or his failure to demonstrate the commensurability of Marxism and existentialism. Although both these concerns highlight important problems in Marcuse's work, this narrow focus of Marcuse scholarship neglects essential aspects of his early thought and tends to draw too hasty parallels between Marcuse and Heidegger. This thesis therefore attaches greater weight to Marcuse's own reception and understanding of a broader cross section of the concurrent intellectual milieu - particularly late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates as to whether idealist philosophy is portable to social science. I argue that by foregrounding Marcuse's early work against the backdrop of neo-idealism better illuminates Marcuse's concern with what types of truth claims inform political action, and how one might assess the validity of these claims.

This dissertation explores the implications of the doctrine of providence for Christian life in the context of racialized modernity, offering a constructive theological response to two interrelated questions. First, how should Christians relate the doctrine of divine providence to the task of political judgment? That is, how should doctrinal accounts of the nature and shape of God’s ongoing activity in history between creation and eschaton inform attempts to come to specific judgments about what God is doing in and through particular historical events? Second, how has whiteness insinuated itself into and distorted Christian attempts to discern the movement of God in history? In short, the dissertation engages divine providence not simply as a doctrine, but as a hermeneutic—a theological lens through which to actively interpret the world in relationship to God—and, more specifically, as a hermeneutic with a problematic history of identifying God’s providential action with the interests and activities of white Christian peoples.

In dialogue with the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and James Cone, the dissertation examines the role played by the doctrine of providence in both theological justifications (Hegel) and critiques (Barth, Cone) of modern theories about European progress, the superiority of Western civilization, and white racial supremacy. I argue that Hegel articulates his problematic vision of providence through an operation of Christological displacement, wherein the figure of European man replaces Jesus Christ as the human subject in relationship to whom world history and global humanity find order, meaning, and purpose. I then turn to Barth and Cone, interpreting their writings on providence and divine action as critiques of the theological problem on display in Hegel.

Through analysis of this conversation within modern Protestant theology about providence, politics, and race, I outline a set of conditions for contemporary theological reflection on these matters. These include commitments to the centrality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ for conceptualizing providence, to the creatureliness of human beings, and to the active work of the Holy Spirit. I also argue that contemporary engagements with the doctrine must address two problems which neither Hegel, Barth, nor Cone sufficiently resolve: the persistent masculinity of Christian accounts of providence and a competitive construal of the Spirit-Son relationship.

The final chapter formulates a constructive hermeneutic of providence in light of these conditions. I develop an account of divine providence as the two-fold work of the Holy Spirit in (1) making Jesus Christ present to creation between ascension and eschaton and (2) enabling human creaturely participation in Christ’s providential presence. Building on themes in womanist theology and contemporary pneumatology, I suggest that the work of the Spirit manifests in three characteristic activities in particular: the Spirit gives life to ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed material bodies; the Spirit joins, drawing those who would normally be strangers and enemies into intimate relationships; the Spirit anticipates the end of time in the midst of the present. By way of conclusion, I suggest how this hermeneutic of providence might help to shape particular judgments about where, how, and in whom the Spirit is making Christ present in the specific context of Durham, North Carolina in the second decade of the twenty-first century in light of the resurgence of thinly veiled white supremacist politics and the rapid gentrification of historic black communities facilitated by urban revitalization initiatives.

Martin Heidegger is generally regarded as one of the most significant—if also the most controversial—philosophers of the 20th century. Most scholarly engagement with Heidegger’s thought on Modernity approaches his work with a special focus on either his critique of technology, or on his more general critique of subjectivity. This dissertation project attempts to elucidate Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, and, by extension, his thought as a whole, from the neglected standpoint of his understanding of mathematics, which he explicitly identifies as the essence of modernity.

Accordingly, our project attempts to work through the development of Modernity, as Heidegger understands it, on the basis of what we call a “mathematical dialectic.“ The basis of our analysis is that Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, both on its own terms and in the context of his theory of history [Seinsgeschichte], is best understood in terms of the interaction between two essential, “mathematical” characteristics, namely, self-grounding and homogeneity. This project first investigates the mathematical qualities of these components of Modernity individually, and then attempts to trace the historical and philosophical development of Modernity on the basis of the interaction between these two components—an interaction that is, we argue, itself regulated by the structure of the mathematical, according to Heidegger’s understanding of the term.

The project undertaken here intends not only to serve as an interpretive, scholarly function of elucidating Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, but also to advance the larger aim of defending the prescience, structural coherence, and relevance of Heidegger’s diagnosis of Modernity as such.