Chapter 1: What is Hegel's view of the relationship between God and creation?
For Hegel, the absolute subject, who is God, is not absolutely divorced from his creation. In fact, his creation is himself. which immediately moves us into a kind of complex view of pantheism, that history does not simply reveal God, but history is God in the sense that it is the unfolding of the absolute spirit in time and space. Did you catch that? It's okay if you didn't.
Dr. Sproul called Hegel's views one of the most complex and difficult systems of philosophy. But his views did have a significant influence on the church and 19th century liberalism. So I encourage you to stay with us as we consider the errors and influence of his philosophical thought.
This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as we spend a week considering the consequences of the philosophical ideas that have shaped the world we live in, many ideas whose echoes are still heard today. You can own this significant series, used by many homeschool families, including my own, when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org.
We'll also send you the companion book, used as a textbook in various homeschools and Christian schools. So who was Hegel, and how did he try to answer the dilemma posed by Immanuel Kant that we learned about yesterday? Here's Dr. Sproul to explain.
When I was a seminary student back in Pittsburgh many, many years ago, one of my classmates would take time frequently from his studies to work at the local educational television station, WQED. And his concern and passion was to have a ministry to children. And I doubt if you've ever heard of this fellow, but he has made the wearing of sweaters in video telecasts acceptable.
It's a wonderful day in the neighborhood, but my wife's out of town, and I forgot my coat, so I took a tip from Fred Rogers today. And perhaps we need something to be a little bit more casual and relaxed today because the subject we have is one of the most difficult in the whole history of philosophy, and that is the philosophy of Hegel. G. W. F. Hegel.
And Hegel dominated the scene of Western philosophy, at least for the first half of the 19th century. And perhaps it could be said that the consequences of his thought shaped the whole of the 19th century. Now, we recall that with Immanuel Kant, we were left with this huge wall, the wall of separation between the noumenal realm and the phenomenal realm.
And Kant said that there was no way that we can get from this realm to the noumenal realm. Now, Hegel's perhaps most important work, it was entitled The Phenomenology of Mind.
He was responding not only to Kant, but also to some other philosophers in the early part of the 19th century who had focused their attention on the supremacy of mind over the material realm, the so-called idealists such as Fichte and Schelling. Now what happened with Hegel and with the whole drift of thought in the 19th century was attention was placed on the phenomenal realm.
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Chapter 2: How did Hegel's philosophy influence 19th-century thought?
That is, Hegel is difficult in any language. So I don't appreciate Hegel for having put me in that embarrassing situation in graduate school. But again, once the attention was on the phenomenal world, on this world. What happened as a result of this was that the locus of attention for philosophy and theology in the 19th century was on what's called eminentism as opposed to transcendence.
Before Kant put up this barrier between this world and the next, The overarching emphasis in Christian theology was on the transcendence of God, that God must always be differentiated from His creation. The church has believed that God was imminent in the sense of being present in the world through His Holy Spirit, by way of creation, through His providence, and through history, and so on.
But at the same time, History was never ever to be confused with God, and creation was never to be confused with God. There was this absolute distinction between the transcendent being of God and the created structure of His work. But now in 19th century philosophy, that significant difference between the transcendent God and His creation begins to become obscured.
And one of the most important philosophers to bring that about was Hegel. who becomes the chief architect in the 19th century for a philosophy of immanentism. In the German, it speaks of God's being desidic, or the desidicite from God, which literally means this-sidedness. Now,
Where Hegel differed sharply from Kant was this, where Kant showed that antinomies or contradictions or tensions between various views of reality drove Kant to skepticism and agnosticism with respect to having any understanding or knowledge of God. Hegel tried to solve that problem with his dialectical system, and he sees that We can't get over the wall from the phenomenal to the noumenal.
But Hegel said that distinction is a false distinction, a false dilemma. Because in the one sense, the noumenal can get over the wall into this world. And the way the noumenal realm comes over the wall into the phenomenal realm is by virtue of God unfolding himself in and through nature. Now, I'm going to explain it a little bit more in a second.
But we've talked several times in our study of the history of philosophy of the so-called subject-object problem. I am a subject, I have a mind, and I have experiences. And my experience is always an experience of what's happening outside of myself, and that is what we call the objective realm.
Now, what the philosophers of all of the centuries have tried to do is find some way to reconcile the subjective realm to the objective realm. And nobody has really been able to solve the problem that's inherent in that.
Now, the earlier idealists tried to reduce everything to the subjective side so that the objective realm, the outside realm, is simply a projection of the mind and doesn't really exist. Or some have tried to say that the mind is simply a part of the material world, and it doesn't exist.
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Chapter 3: Who was G.W.F. Hegel and what was his philosophical significance?
Another what? Antithesis. That's right. You got it. And as you can see, I'm running out of blackboard space here, but this then is resolved in another synthesis, and we can see this pattern go on and on and on.
Well, it's much more complicated than this simple illustration I've just given to you here with respect to philosophy, but you also have the relationship between religion, for example, and art. And there's a tension there, which is then resolved in philosophy. And then you have conflict between philosophy and science, which is then resolved in political theory and so on.
So you have a whole grid of these dialectics working themselves out. And what Hegel is looking for in the process of history is what he called the Aufgehoben dialectics. Now, that's just a fancy German word for something's being elevated to the next level.
You rise above the current dilemma into the next stage of development where you transcend the current difficulty and resolve it into a new thesis. The synthesis is the experience of the Aufgehoben. Now, let me try to talk about this in simple terms if you can.
And anytime you try to speak simply about Hegel, you're taking enormous risks because there's very little, as I said, that is simple about him. Take, for example, music or art. We're familiar with art history or the history of music. And we see different movements taking place, for example, in art.
You have classicism, then you have the response of romanticism, and then you have neoclassicism, and then you have impressionism and expressionism and cubism and all these different advances. And so it is in the history of music. I'm interested, for example, in the history of jazz that began in very simple terms with the blues and with the ragtime beat and the turkey trot and the cakewalk.
And then you've progressed from there to Dixieland jazz and then to progressive jazz and so on. And these new geniuses come on the stage of history and they push the paradigms of music or of art into a new direction. by creating a new synthesis. In a sense, what happens with these geniuses is they challenge the assumptions of previous generations. They see the problem.
of the tension that has held things in a kind of paralysis until they challenge the assumptions and create a new paradigm. But that's not limited simply to art or to music. It's also true in the physical sciences, as we've seen in the history of physics, in the history of astronomy, always moving away from former tensions and trying to seek resolutions of problems that had been there in the past.
As I said a moment ago, perhaps the most deeply felt philosophical problem historically is the problem between the subject and the object. And it's the supreme problem because the subject is thinking about something outside of itself, the object. And how can you ever resolve that?
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