Andrew Shanks on Hegel's Faith and Thought .mpg

um hegel lived from 1770 to 1831 which was a period of extraordinary intellectual creativity in germany generally as a young man he trained for the protestant ministry in the seminary at tubingen but the experience of preaching a sermon or two um quickly persuaded him that he was not called to be a lutheran minister he was a very bad preacher it was a very bad public speaker in general and like so many um young intellectuals of that time he went on to become a house tutor for wealthy families um whilst he was a in in the protestant seminary tubing and the stift he actually shared a room with the very great mad but very great poet friedrich hildenin who was a great friend of his and also the younger that the infant prodigy or of of of german philosophy friedrich wilhelm shelling um and um there were these three extraordinarily brilliant people sharing a room there shelling went on very quickly to become extremely famous um although he was several years younger than than hegel um and um herlin didn't but wrote these extraordinary tortured poems hegel started out whilst working in arizona for aristocratic families as a tutor to their children he started out with the ambition of becoming a religious reformer so he wrote a series of essays focusing upon the story of jesus trying to retell the life of jesus initially from the point of view of straightforward enlightenment rationalism and trying to present jesus as if he were a cantian philosopher however increasingly as he went on he became dissatisfied with that approach and eventually came to the conclusion that he would have to become a philosopher and um he he spent a long period of his life in his 20s and 30s um struggling to get a position in a university and on the whole failing this was a period when university life was struggling in germany the old universities were many of them in the state of great decay there was a sudden new burst of university life just beginning and the university of berlin at which hagel eventually became the second professor of philosophy was part of this new surge in german university life but this was the period of the napoleonic wars and germany was in chaos and hegel's life story for a long time was one of being very very poor and bitter at seeing um people he regarded as fools getting jobs that he ought to get but he wasn't getting them partly because he was a useless lecturer and partly because he wrote in this tortured way that wasn't terribly accessible and anyhow it took him a long time finally to arrive in terms of his career and uh but eventually he did and he became professor of philosophy in berlin and during the 1820s he became a great power in the land to such an extent that he was able to dream of a new world in which he would be the person who wrote the curriculum for philosophy which would be the governing discipline of the new german university world in the way that theology once upon a time had been the governing discipline of of universities but now it would be philosophy and it would moreover be the philosophy taught according to his curriculum that was his dream it was never fulfilled and it evoked a lot of resentment a lot of people are very hostile to hegel because they resent that ambition but at the time one can see why one might have thought that was a good idea um what kind of person was hegel it's to me it's always very important what kind of a person i think her is from a theological point of view and i'm glad to say that hagel is somebody i think i would have liked um although he was a person who was clearly damaged by the stress of and the struggle of his life and this long period as he felt in the wilderness um politically this was a time of terrific um surge of german nationalism in response to the napoleonic invasions and a lot of very enthusiastic dreams of a new germany a lot of the students were caught up in this in reaction against france but also i'm afraid to say for the first time really militantly anti-semitic and hegel i'm glad to say was completely allergic to this form of nationalism and in the 1820s in berlin he was very clearly identified as a friend of jews it's not something that he wrote polemically about but um but he was and the people that he most of all hated were these demagogues um philosophers who lent their philosophical authority to the politics of um anti-semitic german nationalism he was kind of liberal he sympathized to some extent with um with what napoleon stood for that's to say um enlightened laws systematized laws an end to feudal privilege um and civil rights for all including jews so he was kind of liberal in that world and he had a degree of civil courage in prussia in the 1820s that wasn't an entirely comfortable position to defend he makes this with um with with a very distinctive attitude to religion was hegel devout is an interesting question um the answer is no in not in any conventional sense um he did once say that um for the modern man reading the morning newspaper had taken the place of matins and i think that was very much his attitude and yet he's a man of in another sense very intense religious passion but it's a passion for thoughtfulness for systematic open-minded thoughtful critique criticism of everything a refusal to rest content with with with unthought through prejudices and he was extremely impatient with any sort of sentimentality in religion um sentimental piety enraged him so there's something prophetic about hegel and yet he he wasn't a prophet exactly because he was a philosopher there is a kind of prophetic rage i'm a great admirer of the prophet amos there's something there's something of the prophet amos in hegel but it's been completely transformed um into philosophy it ceased to be sheer rage and has become this absolutely intense dedication to thinking things through so that's um that's yeah in that sense he was devout um hegel was not only a very bad preacher he was a very bad lecturer he was extremely wooden had no flair and and yet there was something mesmerizing about his lectures because of the sheer intensity of thoughtfulness in them um that people found yeah people found quite electric despite in terms of sheer delivery he had an ugly voice with a heavy swabian accent um and um and and yeah he didn't enjoy the public performance element in it as a personality hegel was was very introverted he could relax and he could be quite jolly and and he loved a good game of wist um preferably with people he didn't have to talk philosophy with um but um his life he he suffered terribly from stress um and in his uh later years became quite despotic with his friends um [Music] quite painfully so in a way his thinking is a wrestling with that side of his personality i think his thinking is not despotic his thinking is profoundly liberating but it's mixed with um political passions that um arose out of out of painful personal conflicts and so there he is as a colleague of friedrich schleiermacher at the university of berlin this brilliant preacher this charming man this easygoing character who at the same time was much too easily seduced by romantic dreams of germany hegel loathed it he tried very hard to be amicable towards schleichmacher but they were the leaders of two opposing parties and they didn't get on at all they were both of them in one sense liberals but utterly different sorts of liberal and from a hegelian point of view shlaimaka's form of liberalism is shallow glib all this invocation of feeling it's so it's so apologetic it lacks sufficient self-criticism i think uh would be would be hegel's ultimate complaint and it goes back partly to this um yeah they're just incompatible personalities when hegel first became a philosopher it was in the context of an intellectual world dominated by the great figure of kant and here is kant who is intent upon a religion within the limits of pure reason alone which is the title of kant's great book on on religion and it kind of summarizes his views kant wants to absolutely step outside religious tradition has no loyalty to any church wants to reduce religion to [Music] a minimum of straightforward ethical moral absolutely rational concerns and then all the rest to be set completely to one side then another key figure in the background is fichte who was the first professor of philosophy at the university of berlin before hegel and fischer was a disciple of khan who decided to be much more radical victor is in fact an extremely sinister figure he was a brilliant speaker absolutely great orator and at the time of the napoleonic wars he delivered these terrific speeches in berlin full of fire and thunder and and patriotic uplift um a bit of anti-semitism mixed into but

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

Views: 17,930

Keywords: hegel, faith, and, thought, andrew, shanks, manchester, cathedral

Id: ERVIr7QQ1J8

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2011