Author: Richard Edward Harry
Publisher:
Published: 2022
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →
The present study revisits both historically and analytically the work of Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), centering its interpretive lens primarily around his various theoretical and methodological contributions to Religionswissenschaft. Roughly analogous to what we today would call or recognize as the wide-ranging and arguably loosely-knit field of religious studies, Troeltsch's approach to Religionswissenschaft was an expression of foundational epistemological debates that affected the entire disciplinary matrix of the emerging cultural (Kultur-) or human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Troeltsch transcribed how the study of religion had reoccupied deep philosophical issues connected to the eighteenth-century question of the relationship between the Enlightenment ideal of Reason and the traditional or premodern theistic self-understanding of Western civilization. The dissolution of the dogmatic Christian worldview and its adjoining conception of Church authority was the starting-point for Troeltsch's multipronged justification of Religion as a viable category. The autonomy of scientific socio-historical inquiry meant that the operative "theoretical horizon" of the History-of-Religions School had turned "comparative" while being irreversibly "expanded to include the totality of human religions"; Troeltsch's liberal theology would also have to forego conversation-stopping appeals to "supernatural revelation" (übernatürlichen Offenbarung) (1991b, 87-88). Troeltsch's framework for Religionswissenschaft matured during the late nineteenth century and through the First World War. He was an early twentieth-century heir of German Idealism, suffering through a generational post-Hegelian philosophical malaise that culminated in collective fears about civilizational anomie, a crisis of values and meaning. Troeltsch interpreted Nietzsche's madman prophecies about the death of God-viz., the onset of European Nihilismus and the "overcoming" (Überwindung) of Christian metaphysics, morality, and culture by means of a triumphant will-to-power-as a condensed symbol and direct assault on both Enlightenment rationalism and Western religious consciousness. Haunted by Relativismus (both ethical and epistemological), Troeltsch's socio-cultural writings on the conflict-ridden modern "spirit" (Geist) had a taste for melodramatic mandarin themes of spiritual bankruptcy and cultural collapse. Sadly, the tragic course of historical events would prove that he was no alarmist: Troeltsch presciently foresaw that this profound irrationalist deformation in German philosophy was linked to a budding propensity for post-truth barbaric statolatry. Troeltsch retraced these cultural anxieties, which were aggravated by the dizzying pace of accelerated social change, to the modern scientific disenchantment of the cosmos and its heightened sense of "historical consciousness" (historische Bewußtsein)-defined loosely as a deepening insight into the plurality of worldviews and the contingency of religious reasons, cultural values, and practical forms of rationality. Troeltsch wrote seriously about "Die Krisis des Historismus" (1922) as an epistemological and cultural problem, and he fully integrated this concern into his thinking about Religionswissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte, and the post-WWI future of Europäismus. Troeltsch finalized his career in Berlin as a prestigious philosopher of culture dedicated to building a democratic Weimar Republic, critiquing nationalist power politics, and situating Christian liberal theology and ethics within the broader socio-historical discourse of comparative Weltreligionen. Analytic respect for the content of Troeltsch's constructive project reveals systematicity and coherence. Regarding the nature of historical consciousness and its relationship to religious consciousness, the foundational concerns of Religionswissenschaft steered Troeltsch headlong into many longstanding and definitive problems within the Western philosophical tradition. "The systematic study of religion," Troeltsch summarized in 1922, exhibits its greatest depth and power in the way it summons the mind to confront the antinomy of "metaphysics and history," placing "both sets of problems in intimate crossfertilization" (1991b, 366). The constructive portion of Troeltsch's Religionswissenschaft settled on critical idealism, a Baden Neo-Kantian conception of transcendental freedom and rationality that made ample room for faith while limiting philosophy's traditional metaphysical ambitions. Hegel's ontological excesses and theological oversteps rendered his teleological philosophy of history into a crude self-glorification fantasy, but Troeltsch found it important not to throw the idealist baby out with the Absolutist bathwater. Functioning as a Neo-Kantian "value theory" (Werttheorie), Troeltsch's Religionswissenschaft offered an epistemology and philosophy of culture which presupposed a normative conception of rationality that seeks out universal validity in its basic ends or value-orientations. Moreover, Troeltsch's philosophy of religion reincorporated Schleiermacher's mystical notion of "religious consciousness" (religiöse Bewußtsein) right into the very heart of Kant's tripartite economy of practical reason-that is, operative within and underlying rationality in its self-legislating theoretical, moral, and aesthetic forms. Troeltsch believed it was necessary to be suspicious and critical toward all concrete claims of Absoluteness, but idealism's obsession with the problem of normative rationality and its relation to das Absolute could not be completely vanquished or pragmatically deflated. Troeltsch's Werttheorie operates formally as a species of epistemological transcendentalism, holding that autonomous and valid ideals provide some sort of a priori bulwark against historicist relativism in its many guises (1999, 45). Troeltsch ultimately endorsed Platonismus-an ontologically grounded metaphysics of value-and theistic Personalismus. These overbeliefs carried him beyond the sphere of Religionswissenschaft proper, but Troeltsch nevertheless saw the scientific discipline as being compatible with a liberal and non-dogmatic Christian lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and faith (Glaubenslehre).
