Robert R. Williams (1)

Robert R. Williams offers a new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche, two of the most important thinkers on religion in the last 250 years. The opening discussion focuses on a philosophy of tragedy that overcomes the suppression and exclusion of tragedy by both show more traditional philosophy and theology. The second theme concerns Hegel and Nietzsche's views of recognition and community as requiring struggle and contestation, and their contrasting discussions of master and slave, and friendship. The third theme is their critique of Kant, including Kantian morality and its doctrine of the postulates of practical reason that constitutes for Hegel the spurious infinite and for Nietzsche the ascetic ideal. Williams describes how Kant's restriction of cognition to finitude and his doctrine of theology as a postulate of morality is for Hegel the death of God. For Hegel, this requires a response that overcomes the Kantian frame through a reconstruction and renewal of ontotheology-theology based on a reconstruction and defense of the ontological argument-while Nietzsche believes that Kant's restriction of cognition undercuts Socratism and opens up tragedy as a philosophical issue that also undercuts Kant's moral vision of the world. Finally, Williams explores the views of Nietzsche and Hegel on the death of God. Both agree that the God who is dead is the moral-juridical God whose abstract transcendence constitutes the spurious values of the ascetic ideal and the spurious infinite. However, although the moral God is dead, this does not put an end to the God-question or to theology: theology must incorporate the death of God as its own theme. This incorporation includes divine suffering, which in turn involves a tragic absolute-a theme of both the theology of the cross and Nietzsche's Dionysus. Williams argues that both Hegel and Nietzsche continue to pursue the theodicy question, not as a justification of the moral God, but rather as a question of the meaningfulness and goodness of existence despite nihilism and despite tragic conflict and suffering. He asserts that both thinkers criticize traditional theology and metaphysics and affirm with Heraclitus against classical metaphysics that being is an abstraction from becoming. They claim that reconciliation is no conflict-free harmony, but includes a paradoxical tragic dissonance: a disquieted bliss in disaster. show less