The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity: Volume One: The Doctrine of God

402 Pages·2010·2.108 MB·English

by  Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin, Philip T. Grier

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL AS A DOCTRINE OF THE
CONCRETENESS OF GOD AND HUMANITY
Topics in Historical Philosophy
General Editors David Kolb
John McCumber
Associate Editor Anthony J. Steinbock
T H E P H I L O S O P H Y
O F H E G E L A S A
D O C T R I N E O F T H E
C O N C R E T E N E S S
O F G O D A N D
H U M A N I T Y
Volume One: The Doctrine of God
I. A. Il’in
Translated from the Russian and edited by Philip T. Grier
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www .nupress.northwestern .edu
Copyright © 2010 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2010. All
rights reserved. The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God
and Humanity is a translation of Filosofi ia Gegelia kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga
i cheloveka (1918).
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Il’in, I. A. (Ivan Aleksandrovich), 1883–1954.
[Filosofi ia Gegelia kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka. English]
The philosophy of Hegel as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and hu-
manity / I. A. Il’in ; translated from the Russian and edited by Philip T. Grier.
v. cm. — (Topics in historical philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: v. 1. The doctrine of God
ISBN 978- 0- 8101- 2608- 4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831—Religion. 2. God—His-
tory of doctrines—19th century. I. Grier, Philip T., 1942– II. Title. III. Series:
Northwestern University topics in historical philosophy.
B2949.G63I4513 2010
193—dc22
2010008160
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992.
Dedicated to Ella Fedorovna, my wife, without whom it truly would not
have been possible

Contents of Volume One
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xv
Translator’s Introduction xxi
Preface 5
Part 1. The Doctrine of the Essence of the Divinity
1 The Concrete-E mpirical 17
2 The Abstract- Formal 32
3 On Speculative Thinking in General (The Doctrine of Reason) 46
4 The Reality of Thought 71
5 The Universality of Thought 91
6 Dialectic 113
7 The Concrete- Speculative 134
Part 2. The Doctrine of the Divine Path
8 The Concept and Science 163
9 Logic 180
10 The Universe 204
11 On Actuality 225
12 The Shapes of the World 243
Bibliographic Appendix 263
Table of Page Equivalents for the Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion 299
Glossary 303
Foreword
Philip T. Grier
The attempt to retrieve a work of scholarship buried under as much
historical debris as was I. A. Il’in’s original two- volume commentary on
the philosophy of Hegel presented distinct challenges, as well as pos-
sible satisfactions. In 1918 the universe of Russian intellectual life within
which and for which this monumental study was produced stood on the
brink of destruction. The Civil War, commencing just as Il’in undertook
the academic ritual of a formal defense of his work, would shatter that
world irretrievably. By the end of four years of savage confl ict many of
the surviving principal actors in the rich drama of pre-R evolutionary in-
tellectual life would be scattered around various European capitals and
the Far East. A substantial number, including Il’in, would have been forc-
ibly exiled in the autumn of 1922. After that date a new Soviet Russian
culture dominated by the categories of a Marxist proletarian ideology
relentlessly displaced most remnants of the previous intellectual order.
Groups of Russian exiles in various countries made notable efforts to
preserve some of the distinctive traditions of discourse that had defi ned
their lives in pre- Revolutionary Russia, but after a decade or two, these
became increasingly diffi cult to maintain, especially beyond the fi rst gen-
eration of émigrés.
A fuller appreciation of Il’in’s achievement required not only that
the work itself be brought to light, but that the specifi c intellectual milieu
within which it was produced be at least partially restored to view; that is
one of the principal aims of my translator’s introduction. In the fi rst in-
stance, that milieu was woven from the varied strands of Russian cultural
preoccupations emerging during the fi rst two decades of the twentieth
century, a dizzying tapestry of such new themes as Freudian psychoana-
lytic theory, empirical psychology, theosophy, Stanislavsky’s innovations
in the theater, the metaphysics of Sophiology, Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy, the “God-s eeking” movement, Nietzscheanism, cosmism, the mod-
ernist movement in art and architecture, and several others. Intermixed
with these developments were radical political movements ranging from
anarchism to Marxism to terrorism. All of these played out against the
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