Hegel

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 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 a manual con 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, GWF 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

a manual con we were left with this huge wall, the wall of separation between the nominal realm

and the phenomenal realm. And Kant said that there was no way that we can get from this realm

to the nominal realm. Now Hegel's perhaps most important work, he 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 Shelling. Now what happened with Hegel and with the

whole drift of thought in the 19th century was attention was placed on the phenomenal realm.

And as a result of this, a whole new chapter emerged in the history of philosophy. And this new

chapter in the history of philosophy was that philosophy began to move away from being preoccupied

with issues of metaphysics and epistemology and now focused this attention on the meaning of

human experience, experience that takes place in this realm. Now to simplify that, what emerged

was an attempt to construct in the history of philosophy a philosophy of history. This is what

dominated the thinking of Hegel and certainly his successor Karl Marx. The whole question was

what is the significance and the meaning of the sum total of human experience, not only my experience

in your experience, but the experience of the race in our experience of history. Now Hegel developed

what was called a dialectical view of history. A dialectical view of history, and we can call

Hegel's philosophy dialectical idealism. Now for many people, they've never heard that term before

dialectical idealism, but they probably have heard a term that's very close to it called

dialectical materialism, which is the sophisticated title for the philosophy of Karl Marx.

As I say, this whole system that Hegel developed is one of the most complex and difficult systems

of philosophy that the world has ever been asked to digest. Again, when I was in graduate school

in Amsterdam, after I went to Europe in May and spent the entire summer studying the Dutch

language, the very first lecture that I had to attend at the university was a lecture in a philosophy

course I was taking on Hegel. At the end of the lecture, the professor being very kind and

gracious came up to me, knowing that I was an American student and so on, and he said to me,

how did it go with Hegel? Or he asked me, how did it go with being able to translate what he was

saying? And I said, I found it very difficult. Of course, what I meant was it was difficult for me to

follow a professor lecturing in a foreign language in my first baptism in it. And he shook his head

and smiled and he said, yeah, he said, Hegel, he is muleck in Iderthal, 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 and 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 churches 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 Hagel, who becomes the chief architect in the 19th century for a philosophy

of eminentism. And the German speaks of God's being desidic, or the desidic height from God,

which literally means this sitedness. Now, where Hagel differed sharply from Kant was this,

where Kant showed that antinemies, 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. Hagel 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 nominal. But Hagel said that distinction

is a false distinction, a false dilemma. Because in the one sense, the nominal can get over the wall

into this world. And the way the nominal 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.

Well, 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. In other words, when people try to solve the tension between

the external world and the internal world, the tendency or the trend is to do what?

Is to go to one pole or the other and let that pole swallow up the other one?

Well, again, the way Hagel constructed his philosophy of history was through this process

called the dialectic, and the dialectic works like this in all the different areas of human

experience that we have, such as art, philosophy, theology, music, economics, physics, astronomy,

whatever. We find a process taking place that involves tensions that are overcome on the plane

of history, and it goes like this. Somebody will come up with a thesis like Parmenides,

everything is being. And that thesis invariably evokes an antithesis that is a theory that is

in polar tension to it, such as we saw with Heraclitus and Parmenides. One said,

everything is being, the other one said, no, everything is becoming. So now, the progress of

philosophical development is stifled. There's a blockade here because you can't get past this

tension until somebody comes along and resolves the problem by creating what is called a synthesis.

We saw that, for example, when Plato sought to reconcile Parmenides and Heraclitus by creating

his synthetic philosophy of the two realms and so on, and then that synthesis becomes the new

thesis, and invariably that thesis provokes what? Another antithesis, such as we saw with Aristotle

challenging Plato. Now, then what happens is that this creates a roadblock for a certain period of

time until somebody else comes along and takes ideas from both of these sides, works them out

together and creates another synthesis. Now, of course, what happens with that synthesis is that

new paradigm or that new system or that new philosophical viewpoint becomes the basis for a new

thesis and what does that do? It provokes what, Roger? What would you guess? 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 attention there, which is then resolved in philosophy. 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 alfgehobin. 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 alfgehobin. 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 cake walk. And then you've progressed from there to dixially in 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. Now, 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? Well, for Hegel,

the resolution of this problem is resolved by His concept of the absolute subject,

or what He calls the absolute spirit. Sometimes this is referred to as reason with a capital R.

Now, what's going on in this scheme is this, that the absolute spirit is not

ultimately distinct from the world. 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. So that what history is is

simply the dynamic of God working Himself out, thinking about Himself, experiencing Himself in

space and time. So for Hegel, for example, he would not deny that Jesus was the incarnation of God.

However, if you would say that Christ is the unique incarnation of God, he would have disputed that

because all of history is the incarnation of God. And all of history is the revelation of God. So you

don't look for a delivered word from on high, from a transcendent God who inspires prophets and

have them be conduits of revelation in a propositional sense like we have in our Bible.

In one sense, for Hegel, all revelation is general revelation or natural revelation because

all of nature is God's experience of Himself. And so in this dialectical way, God works Himself

out so that God is not an immutable being, but He is a God who is in process, in process of

development. And the development of God, the development of this process is history. So in a very

real sense, history itself is divine. Now, this approach, as I said, is called dialectical.

And that's one of the things that makes it so difficult because a dialectic involves a

tension between seemingly disparate ideas. I remember listening to a conversation, the late

Cornelius Vantill had with a philosopher from Holland, and Vantill was quizzing this philosopher

about his views, and Vantill was having a hard time understanding them. And when he would ask

questions, this philosopher would say, well, it's a dialectic. And finally, in frustration,

Vantill looked at this philosopher and said, will you please tell me your theology just once

without the dialectic so I can understand what you're talking about? Because what Vantill is saying

is the contradictory ideas are really never intelligible. But again, for Hegel, the dialectic

doesn't necessarily involve an absolute contradiction, but a seeming contradiction of tension,

which is capable of being resolved. But it's not resolved by logical speculation. It's resolved

simply by experience and the whole experience of human history. Now, the impact of this on the church

was radical because out of Hegel came the whole development of the so-called religious

historical school. And the whole emphasis in 19th century theology, liberal theology, was on

imminentism, where God was bound up with the world. And his transcendent otherness was being more

and more obscured in 19th century theology. And the buzzword in theology, as well as in philosophy

of 19th century thought, was the word evolution, which speaks in terms of progress, not simply in

the biological realm, but in all of the realm of nature, in all of history, there is a progressive

movement, and the assumption is, as I would say, that the movement is making progress, that you

start with the simple and you move towards the complex. And that movement is always an upward

movement, as you build these triads, one upon each other, everything is moving in an upward

direction. So, for Hegel, history is the evolution of God. God himself is an evolutionary being,

and everything is in this process of development. Now, this provoked a very strong sense of optimism

in the 19th century, with respect to human history, that the world was getting better and better

as more and more problems were being resolved, and questions were being answered, and this world

is moving towards a kind of omega point of greatness and perfection, as God himself is realizing his

own potential in the sphere of human history.

That was RC Sprawl on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, from his series The Consequences

of Ideas. This 35-message series is designed to help you trace the history of Western thought,

the influences of the past, and the old ideas that some are trying to make new again,

and of course, to help you see where these ideas deviate from the truth revealed to us in God's

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there's still time at RenewingYourMind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes.

Well, the name that is perhaps more familiar to you than Hagelwaz is Karl Marx,

and that's who RC Sproul will teach on tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.