Giving a Reason for Hope: Ricoeur on the “Permanent Value” of Hegel’s Hermeneutic of Religion

This presentation explores Ricoeur’s “endless” interpretation of Hegel’s hermeneutic of religion. I complicate Ricoeur’s reading of Hegelian “absolute knowing” as a (purely) epistemological goal, showing instead that the “reciprocal recognition that is absolute spirit” accomplished at the end of Hegel’s dialectic of morality is a practice (of forgiveness), as is the self-expressive “utterance” of the forgiving community that Hegel studies in his chapter on religion. Given this practical orientation in Hegel's text, we have reason to interpret “absolute knowing”—which Ricoeur summarizes as “the conceptual light within which each cultural context, and finally each religious representation, thinks itself”—likewise in practical terms. Thinking, then, does not dissolve our (religious) hopes in an open future in conceptual recapitulation; rather, it is the practice of “giving a reason for the hope that is within us” in the context of interreligious dialogue.