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

318 Pages·2011·1.487 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 Two: The Doctrine of
Humanity
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 © 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2011. 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. 2. The doctrine of humanity
ISBN 978-0-8101-2610-7 (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 Two
A Brief Introduction to Volume Two ix
Part 3. The Doctrine of the Meaning of Human Life
13 Freedom 5
14 Humanity 21
15 Will 31
16 Right 47
17 Morality 81
18 Ethical Life 105
19 On Personhood and Its Virtue 135
20 On the State 163
21 The Limit of the Human 197
22 Conclusion: The Crisis of Theodicy 225
Bibliographic Appendix 259
Table of Page Equivalents for the Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion 287
Glossary 291

A Brief Introduction to Volume Two
Philip T. Grier
Most of the contents of this second volume of I. A. Il’in’s commentary on
the philosophy of Hegel will be unknown even to those who have read
his 1946 German version of the text, because in that version he omitted
eight of the original ten chapters of this volume. These omitted chap-
ters provide an extended refl ection on the central categories of Hegel’s
moral, legal, and political philosophies, as well as of the philosophy of
history. The topics examined in this volume are, in order: freedom, hu-
manity, will, right, morality, ethical life, personhood and its virtue, and
the state. Contained within these chapters are some notably insightful
expositions of core doctrines in Hegel’s philosophy. The main critical
conclusions derived from these fi rst eight chapters are presented in the
ninth chapter on “The Limits of the Human” (chapter 21, which ap-
peared as chapter 13 in the German edition). Il’in’s conclusions on He-
gel’s philosophical project as a whole are contained in the tenth chapter
on “The Crisis of Theodicy” (chapter 22, which appeared as chapter 14
in the German edition).
Il’in tells us that his most intense study of Hegel, and the writing
of this commentary, stretched over a period of eight years, from 1908 to
1916, at which point, he said, the manuscript was essentially complete.
We know that volume 1 had basically been completed by 1914; the years
1914–16 were therefore presumably devoted to the completion of vol-
ume 2 (contemporaneous with the beginning of the First World War and
the growing instability of the tsarist state).
The timing of Il’in’s research on Hegel was such that he was able to
take account of Nohl’s and Lasson’s publications of various early works
of Hegel which had previously been diffi cult of access. His reference in
the preface of volume 1 to a “renaissance” of Hegelianism occurring
in Germany was doubtless intended to include both Georg Lasson’s re-
vised and enhanced edition of Hegel’s collected works, the Sämtliche
Werke (Leipzig: Felix Meiner), which began appearing in 1905, and Her-
mann Nohl’s edition of the early theological writings, Hegels Theologische
Jugendschriften (Tübingen: Mohr), which appeared in 1907. Like other
Hegel scholars of the early twentieth century, Il’in was fascinated by the
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