This chapter explores the impact of Hegel's work in relation to three influential successors — Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard — who accept much of his general story of the stages of the history of philosophy but believe, for different reasons, that it has an all too idealistic shape. Feuerbach feels a need to stress the importance of sensory experience, and he goes into much more psychological detail than Hegel in explaining the structures of the phenomenon of unhappy consciousness, that is, alienated religiosity, especially in dogmatic Christianity. Hegel's and Feuerbach's notion of alienation is thematized by Marx in terms of the concrete economic (capitalist) phenomenon of forfeiting our ‘species being’, that is, our capacity for acts of unfettered production for the sake of humanity as a whole. Kierkegaard seems implicitly willing to accept much of the historical and teleological story that Hegel has to tell about traditional philosophy as such, but he is most interested in something that this story leaves out: the concern with individual freedom and the possibility of a relationship to a personal God that dominates traditional Christianity and the work of figures such as Kant, Hamann, Jacobi, and the later Schelling (whose final lectures Kierkegaard briefly attended in Berlin).
Keywords: Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard