From JOURNALS AND PAPERS (1851)
On the age of reason.
“The greater honesty in even the most bitter attacks of an earlier age upon Christianity was that the essentially Christian was fairly well allowed to remain intact. The danger in Hegel was that he altered Christianity—and thereby achieved agreement with his philosophy. In general it is characteristic of an age of reason not to let the task remain intact and say: No—but to alter the task and then say: Yes, of course, we are agreed. The hypocrisy of reason is infinitely treacherous. This is why it is so difficult to take aim.”
At one time, it was standard for intellectual historians to juxtapose Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Kierkegaard—and not without justification. Certainly Kierkegaard presses a critique of Hegel in works such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). And yet, over the last couple of decades, scholars have begun to build consensus around the idea that Kierkegaard was not so much an opponent of Hegel himself as of a tendency latent in Hegelian thinking, namely, to subsume cultural forms and historical patterns under the aegis of reason. Indeed, as Kierkegaard suggests in the above passage, Hegel is but a key representative of modern rationality—a putatively objective mindset that drains the meaning out of existential ideals precisely by critically explaining them away.
Heavy thought.