NATIONALISM: THE NEW METAPHYSICS OF MODERNITY. A HEGELIAN GENEALOGY

Abstract

When the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the wave of secularization shattered the traditional world’s religious protective shield, modern man found himself in the midst of a massive crisis of meaning and existence. The fundamental problem we pursue in this study is precisely this: How did the modern world overcome this crisis of meaning? How did it transfer God's unshakeable, transcendent authority in the heavens to the nation-state on earth, and how did it construct a new secular theology for which nationalism is worth dying? The most systematic and radical answer to this question on a philosophical level can be found in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of law and history.The aim of this research is to decipher why nationalism has become the new refuge of modern man, through Hegel's famous concept of “Spirit”. For in the Hegelian system, the nation is not a crowd that has come together by chance, but the most concrete manifestation of the universal reason on earth. In this article, we argue that concepts important to traditional religious thought, such as creation, eternity, and the sacred, have not been entirely eradicated by modern nation-state ideology, but rather reproduced in new forms. In this process, concepts such as Secular Genesis, Substantial Unity and World Spirit emerged as secular-worldly explanations that replaced old religious meanings. This article, drawing on literature on civil and political religion, aims to demonstrate how the nation is positioned as a kind of absolute value and almost a demanding secular God in response to the modern individual's anxieties about loneliness and death.