Structures of the Holy: Religion in Hegel and Levinas

The dissertation argues that Levinas's confrontation with Hegel crystallizes around their respective conceptions of religion. On the basis of a close reading of certain crucial pages from the chapter on religion in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I draw an analogy between Levinas's distinction between the sacred and the holy and Hegel's distinction between nature and art religion and consummate religion. However, this resemblance is offset by their basic disagreement over whether infinity signifies "inner difference" (Hegel) or the absolutely other (Levinas). To explain this disagreement, I first ask whether Levinas's account of the relation to the Other can be assimilated to Hegel's account of unhappy consciousness. I argue that this is not possible, but then show that Hegel's idea of Spirit is not subsumed by Levinas's account of the social. This impasse leads me to reframe the dispute by pointing out that Hegel and Levinas both deny that the logic of mutual exclusion governs the relation between the same and the other. Both thinkers use the religious notion of incarnation to signify a relation of co-implication between the other and the same. However, Levinas's account of incarnation challenges the law of excluded middle, while Hegel's incarnation challenges the law of noncontradiction.