Manuel Tangorra (Diego Portales University)

Abstract

In one of his early texts from the Tübingen period, Hegel develops a particularly careful reading of Kant’s Religionsschrift, while suggesting that the latter paid insufficient attention to the communitarian embodiment of religion: “Even the purest religion of reason becomes embodied in the souls of men—and still more in that of the people” (GW 1, 107). While traditional readings have identified in lines such as these a transition from an individualist conception of moral responsibility to a communitarian ethical paradigm, I argue that the divergence between Kant and Hegel is better understood as a disagreement over what constitutes a community as such. To explore this hypothesis, I first analyse how Kant retrieves, in 1793, the notion of the Volk Gottes to articulate his view of the nature of ethical communities. I then turn to Hegel’s early critique—particularly in his fragments on Volksreligion—and to what I take to be a new principle of spiritual activity characteristic of human collectives. Finally, I inquire into how this divergence between Kant and Hegel anticipates a more general transformation in the notion of the “people” in post-Kantian philosophy: a shift from a fundamentally juridical conception of community to one grounded in the concept of spirit.