As the primary fount of teleological philosophies of history, grappling with Hegel clarifies contemporary disenchantment with ideas of immanent progress and opens tentative Bahá’í alternative visions. Some Bahá’í scholarship draws reasonable connections with Hegel. I propose a reading more sympathetic to the disillusionment with Hegel that has carried 20th and 21st-century philosophy, articulated brilliantly by scholars like Adorno and Benjamin and later Derrida and Gadamer, Chakrabarty, and others. This disillusionment with progress that followed the World Wars, decolonization, and the rise of ecological thought reveals a chauvinist and unethical limit inherent to our modern metaphysics. Yet, without other resources of hope, contemporary philosophy has maintained its attachment to this inheritance, engaging it in a new ironical, self-critical, and otherwise ambivalent register. For many this hope has outright collapsed. Bahá’í eschatology, I argue, with its expanding oneness, is a radically non-Hegelian and sui generis philosophy of history. Rather than the immanent, conflictual motor of modern metaphysics, displacing personal ethics by collective abstract forces and recommending a partisan engagement therein, the Bahá’í Faith describes an expanding oneness, driven by the collective power of ethical life, slowly overtaking exploded theories and institutions. This as fluently captures the modern experience of rupture and conflict, a comprehension other theological and traditionalist responses to Hegel struggle to attain. The Faith also maintains its belief in progress without making conflict the driver. Instead it is an unnecessary barrier, aligning the Faith with the downtrodden, not the victors, and avoiding the repulsive relationship between modern teleologies and historical evil. Following scholars of temporality like Hartog, Koselleck, and Lowith, I would trace this rise and fall of teleological thought and its relationship to Christian eschatology. Then I would discuss Islam’s very modern intervention regarding the collective power of ethical life, followed by the Bahá’í Faith’s expansive recasting.
Ney Grant lives in Chicago. He has his M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and has a growing interest in independent Bahá’í Studies scholarship. Before returning to graduate school he worked as a case manager in acute inpatient mental health. He currently works as a substitute teacher while he is applying to philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities Ph.D. programs. His intellectual interests lie at the intersection of Islamic studies, continental philosophy, and theology. His M.A. thesis focused on Egyptian and North African Islamic modernists who worked to integrate these fields. Working on questions of temporality in these postcolonial and Islamic contexts, Ney became very intrigued by the unique articulations of modernity in the Bahá’í Writings and the works of Shoghi Effendi.
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