The death of God in Hegel's philosophy : love, speculation, dialectics, and the unification of absolute extremes

The majority of recent Hegel scholarship on the death of God focuses on issues such as the cultural problems of subjectivity and agnosticism about religion and philosophy that Hegel diagnosed in his day, the reality status of the God who has purportedly died, the notion of tragedy in the death of God, the mutability or plasticity of the God who dies, and other related themes. This thesis takes a different approach to Hegel on the death of God, one which focuses on the unification of opposites as central to Hegel’s account of the death of God, more specifically the unification of the most extreme opposites of God and death in love. I provide a close reading of Hegel’s remarks on love as unification beginning in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate and ending in Hegel’s final 1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Volume III: The Consummate Religion. In-between this early and late work, I situate the remarks on the death of God at the end of Faith and Knowledge and The Phenomenology of Spirit and argue that the unification of opposites found in speculative philosophy and dialectical reason is deeply connected to his notion of love brought out more explicitly in his work which addresses religion more directly. I argue that the death of God for Hegel is the highest and most extreme instance of spirit at the heart of his philosophy, namely the unification of opposites, in which love, speculation, and dialectics all play a role