“I have a certain weakness for Hegel”,
… said Karl Barth in 1953, “and am always
fond of doing a bit of Hegeling”.
In this lecture I want to consider what it
might mean to do a bit of Hegeling. In my
experience it is not possible to ‘do a bit’:
engaging Hegel is an undertaking that requires
strenuous preparation, a certain apprenticeship
even. But first we must ask, who are these
figures and how did they clash?
GWF Hegel was born in 1770, the same year
as Beethoven and finished his varied career
at the relatively new University of Berlin,
where he had held a chair in philosophy from
1818, appointed when he was forty-eight years
old. The University of Berlin (now Humboldt
University) had been founded seven years earlier,
with a faculty of philosophy which was, unusually
and intentionally, separate from the faculty
of theology. His major work after his appointment
was his Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
published in 1820, although he continued to
revise his previous works (including his Science
of Logic and his Encyclopedia of Philosophical
Sciences) and to develop new lecture courses,
including – importantly for us this evening
– Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.
He delivered these between 1821 and 1831,
the year of his death. Hegel did not publish
these – he published no books in the last
ten years of his life – but lecture notes
from those who attended were gathered, edited
and published and we have a good sense of
what those lectures contained. Hegel’s intellectual
interests, like many philosophers of that
time, were typically broad. He wrote on questions
of metaphysics, ethics, logic, law, the natural
sciences, religion, politics, aesthetics,
the history of philosophy and on the concept
of history itself.
Karl Barth was born over a hundred years later
in Basel in 1886, a few months before the
composer Nadia Boulanger, and the same year
as the sculptor Jean Arp . He held professorships
in Germany, in Göttingen, Münster, and in
Bonn between 1921 and 1935, between the ages
of 35 and 49, at which point he was forced
to resign his post because he refused to swear
an oath to Hitler. He was swiftly appointed
professor of systematic theology at the University
of Basel and remained there for the last 27
years of his career, until his retirement
in 1962 at the age of 75. He published a vast
oeuvre, most notably the Church Dogmatics,
an unfinished masterpiece in 13 volumes.
We are interested this evening in the periods
when these two figures each held professorships
at the starts of their mature careers, when
Hegel was delivering his lectures on the philosophy
of religion in Berlin his mid 50s, and Barth
was delivering lectures on major German figures,
including Hegel, in Bonn his late 40s.
Both were writing during periods of political
turmoil. Hegel had completed his Phenomenology
of Spirit in 1806 in Jena during the twin
battles of Jena and Auerstedt, in which the
Prussian armies were decisively defeated by
Napoleon. It is common to remember Hegel’s
description, in a letter to a friend, of his
impression of Napoleon just before the battle:
I saw the Emperor – this world-spirit – riding
out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed
a wonderful sensation to see such an individual,
who, concentrated here at a single point,
astride a horse, reaches out over the world
and masters it ... this extraordinary man,
whom it is impossible not to admire.
But such a view at a cosmic scale should not
distract us from attention to ordinary life
at a local level. Hegel was at that time an
‘Extraordinary Professor’ in Jena, an
unsalaried position, and he suffered first-hand
the catastrophic effects of the badly organised
feudal Prussian State facing an efficient,
modern adversary with a streamlined chain
of command. He was financially dependent on
student enrolments and of course these collapsed
in the after-effects of the battle. During
Hegel’s later career, what would later become
Germany eventually began undergoing rapid
political development in the wake of the French
revolution (over thirty years earlier) and
then the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, with its concern with
authority, law and the principles which order
the state, was composed against these attempts
at modernisation and reform. These reforms
were slow in coming, however, and in the year
before Hegel’s death, there were riots in
Berlin.
Barth’s theology was formed against the
backdrop of the Great War and the proud support
of many of Germany’s senior theologians
for German military action. The Manifesto
of the Ninety-Three was a proclamation signed
by well-known figures in the arts and sciences,
and it included several theologians including
the Church Historian Adolf von Harnack and
Wilhelm Hermann (one of Barth’s teachers),
as well as several figures that are now part
of our cultural intellectual furniture, including
Ernst Haeckel (stem cells), Engelbert Humperdinck
(Hansel and Gretel) , Felix Klein (non-Euclidean
Geometry), Max Klinger (a sculptor, whose
Girl Bathing you can see in the Birmingham
Museum of Art), Max Planck (quantum theory),
and Wilhelm Windelband (now remembered for
the terms nomothetic and idiographic). For
Barth and many others of his generation this
complicity between intellectual life in universities
and German militarism was a stark sign that
another reformation was needed. Barth’s
theology was developed as a set of alternatives
to State violence backed by religion. He was
a theology professor in Göttingen and Münster
during the Weimar Republic, and then professor
in Bonn when, in the wake of the financial
crisis of 1929, the National Socialists became
the largest party in the Federal Election
in July 1932 elections, followed by Hitler’s
appointment as Chancellor in January 1933.
Universities quickly became the focus of book-burnings
and university professors faced a stark choice
over whether to affirm their allegiance to
the State or to be forced out. Barth was a
key figure in the publication of the Barmen
Declaration in 1934, a document denouncing
the subordination of the church to the state.
He had to leave Bonn the following year and
returned to his native Switzerland, where
he continued with the project of Church Dogmatics,
which he had begun in the same year that the
Nazis won their first elections. Church Dogmatics
is a sustained attempt to develop fundamental
categories out of scripture and the long Christian
tradition, rather than out of modern philosophy
and common-sense cultural life.
These are our two figures.
Barth was lecturing on Hegel in Bonn in the
early 1930s, just before he was forced out.
He published a long essay (it is much longer
than any lecture could be) in 1947, with a
corrected version in 1952. It appeared in
a volume entitled Protestant Theology in the
Nineteenth Century, its background and history.
Hegel is one of several figures in the Vorgeschichte
– backstory – section, which treats Rousseau,
Lessing, Kant, Herder, Novalis and – finally
– Hegel. The work then turns to theologians,
starting with Schleiermacher.
It is an intellectual story, and Hegel comes
at the end of it. The Hegel essay is long
– thirty-five pages of small print in the
German, interrupted by a high quality plate,
a portrait of Hegel by an unknown artist,
with suitably wide eyes.
(English translations do not offer such relief
– the original Swiss publishers, by contrast,
spared no expense).
Who was Hegel for Barth? Barth begins his
essay with a puzzle. Why was Hegel’s thought
so quickly abandoned after his death, given
the considerable power of its vision (PTNC
343 4; 384 5)?.
Barth distinguishes two questions. First,
why was Hegel abandoned in the mid 1800s?
Second, why is the current (in the early 1930s)
‘Hegel renaissance’ such an underwhelming
affair? ‘This is astonishing’ (PTNC 344;
385). Barth advances five Hegelian theses,
posed originally as rhetorical questions
1. Hegel rejoices equally in reason and history,
free of ‘all the ties of tradition’;
2. He exploited Kant’s discovery of the
transcendent nature of the human capacity
to reason;
3. He realised the goal of attempting to oppose
Kant’s real or supposed one-sidedness;
4. He was a great systematiser of the Romantic
immediacy of ‘creative individuality’
and the dialectic of the way this individual’s
life moves;
5. He came as the fulfiller of every promise
that he inherited.
Barth notes the extraordinary popularity of
Hegel’s philosophy in Berlin during the
1820s. Surely Hegel embodied the spirit of
that age. Thus the rejection that followed
Hegel’s death was that later age’s refusal
or denial of itself, of its own spirit.
Barth is particularly interested in the later
period from the 1880s onwards. For him it
is a meaner, stingier world, where a boom
in the natural and historical sciences has
tended to turn scholars less into the living
transmission of a tradition and more into
stock takers and accountants with no living
relation to the past. What Gadamer would later
call Wirkungsgeschichte, the past acting on
and shaping the present, became just Geschichte,
history, a display in a museum, under glass,
inert.
In Barth’s words it was somehow resigned:
‘…and this resignation began to lay itself
like a paralysing spell upon all intellectual
life’ (PTNC 345; 387).
There is thus, for Barth, a noticeable contrast
between the outward pomp of Kaiser Wilhelm’s
Germany (i.e. from 1888 onwards, after Wilhelm
became emperor) and the small-mindedness of
its intellectual life. Again in Barth’s
words: ‘the century had become tired and
somehow sad for all its enforced jollity’
(PTNC 346; 387).
But Hegel is not the hero of this account.
Barth is troubled – troubled by Nazism and
the Deutsche Christen in the 1930s when it
was written and troubled by the aftermath
of the war in 1947, when it was published.
He is troubled by Hegel’s supreme confidence,
a confidence Barth does not share and urges
his reader not to share either.
Hegel, for Barth, is confident in the power
of thought. Hegel is self-confident. He is
confident about philosophy’s all-embracing
capacity. He is especially confident that
God can be understood, rendered intelligible,
conceptualised.
For Hegel, as Barth interprets him, philosophy
embraces everything including theology. Hegel
is the voice of modern man who understands
everything and who has considered all objections
and has answered them in advance, for whom
confidence in God is confidence in himself,
and for whom to listen to Hegel’s God is
to ‘hear the loveliest and deepest echo
of his own voice’ (PTNC 355; 397).
The identity which exists between our thinking
and what is thought, in so far as it is achieved
in the act of thinking is, with Hegel, called
spirit [Geist]. So Hegel’s brand of self-confidence
is also confidence in spirit which for its
own part is one with God and the same with
God
It is Titanism to the highest degree and at
the same time to the highest degree of humility.
The self-confidence it proclaims … is at
once and as such confidence in God
Here then is the fundamental contradiction.
Hegel says he is talking about God. But Barth
worries that in fact Hegel is talking about
Prussian self-consciousness. Hegel presents
his work with the utmost humility, as a concern
with God. But this humility is a cover for
supreme self-confidence.
(For those with a keen ear in the history
of ideas, this is pure Feuerbach, from the
Essence of Christianity of 1841 – published
ten years after Hegel’s death.)
The chief exhibit in this display of self-confidence
is ‘the concept’ in Hegel. Everything
turns on how Barth interprets this. It is
for Barth a simple matter. Hegel’s understanding
of ‘the concept’ is the unity of thinking
and being.
The 
relationship between thinking and being – between
how we think things are and how they area
– is one of the classic puzzles in philosophy,
because, after all, on the one hand there
is no getting around our thinking: it is ever-present.
We have no relation to the world except in
our thinking. But on the other hand we know
we are often wrong, sometimes horribly wrong.
Just because we think it, doesn’t make it
so.
Barth thinks that Hegel has this relationship
between thinking and being badly wrong. Hegel
makes several errors, all stemming ultimately
from the first one.
Hegel’s first error, for Barth, is to suppose
that there is an identity between thinking
and what is thought. In Hegel’s philosophy
what I am thinking, and what I am thinking
about, are the same.
The second error is like, namely this: all
reality is contained in the concept. The concept
bestrides everything and includes everything
in itself.
The third error is that because of this all-encompassing
power of the concept, all contradictions are
absorbed and annulled by the concept. Barth
is particularly concerned that Hegel says
this explicitly and seems even to celebrate
this quality of the concept.
The fourth error is inconsistency. Hegel uses
various technical terms but he makes the mistake
of allowing them to bleed into each other;
they overlap. Hegel wholly fails to keep them
distinct – quite unlike the admirable philosophy
textbooks that Barth is familiar with. Hegel
is woefully loose with his terms.
This is the case for the prosecution. Barth
does not end on an entirely critical note.
He commends Hegel for taking knowledge of
God seriously; for taking history seriously;
for wanting to overcome contradictions. Barth
also commends Hegel for challenging theology
for tendencies to cavil about whether there
can be knowledge of God; for its tendency
to make abstract claims not anchored in history;
for its willingness to allow its claims to
be reduced to materialism, or science or whatever.
Nonetheless the rejection of Hegel is decisive.
What are we to make of this comprehensive
and crushing critique?
We face three problems.
The first is that this critique is deeply
influential in the field of theology. There
are quite literally hundreds of theologians
whose only perspective on Hegel comes from
Barth’s essay, either directly or indirectly.
It is not an easy matter to shift this heavy
weight of presumption against Hegel.
The second is that Hegel’s work is not easy
to read. Hegel has many fine qualities as
a thinker but he is not a great writer. His
terminology is obscure; his approach is often
oblique; one can quickly get bogged down explaining
jargon.
The third is that many defences of Hegel are,
to put it bluntly, as opaque as the original;
worse, many defences of Hegel co-opt him for
a particular vision of liberal theology (liberal
in a very strong sense) which tends to confirm
more traditional figures in their prejudice
against him. If Hegel does not repel his theological
readers, his defenders often manage it for
him.
This, then, is a challenge of courtroom strategy.
The case for the prosecution has been made.
I certainly want to give Hegel a reply to
Barth. He deserves one. But I am reluctant
to put him straight in the witness box and
have him speak in his own words. His vocabulary
and his bold claims will very likely work
in the prosecution’s favour. Hegel is quite
possibly a hostile witness at his own trial,
if only because of the time we would need
to disentangle his prose.
There is a better option: immediately to recall
Barth and consider the charges one by one.
To do this, we need a skilled philosophical
defender who understands Hegel but who also
has a certain sympathy for Barth and grasps,
at a deep level, why he might approach things
the way he does. I propose to call the English
philosopher R.G. Collingwood and have him
conduct the defence.
Collingwood was an almost exact contemporary
of Barth (three years younger), and his relevant
work on philosophical method was published
at almost exactly the same time that Barth
was lecturing on Hegel. We will not concern
ourselves with biographical details: his sole
function here is as barrister conducting a
defence.
With Collingwood as our guide, we shall take
up Barth’s four errors.
This is a matter of what is meant by identity.
If one means that they are the same, then
clearly Hegel is in the wrong. Thinking and
being are not the same: we know this from
the simple fact that our thinking is sometimes
mistaken. It is better to say that for Hegel
thinking and being are a unity. This is so
in two ways: our thinking is a product of
social life (being); but anything we say about
being is thought (thinking). There is no way
to get outside thinking to compare the relation
of thinking to being. Thinking and being are
thus identical in a rather limited sense,
and in fact in a way that is not compatible
with common-sense uses of 
the term.
Concepts have two uses – everyday use and
philosophical use. In everyday use, concepts
are distinct and opposed. e.g. Yesterday was
a warm day; today is a cold day. In philosophical
use, concepts embrace all degrees of difference.
e.g. the concept of ‘heat’ embraces everything
on the scale of hotness, including – ‘encompassing’
– warm and cold. Hegel’s ‘concept’
describes this philosophical use.
In everyday use, concepts frequently contradict
and oppose each other. A hot bath is opposed
to 
a cold bath. In 
philosophical use, concepts embrace all such
contradictions: The concept of heat, in philosophical
usage, embraces hot and cold with respect
to baths. The contradiction between hot and
cold is ‘annulled’. NB This has no effect
on whether your bath is hot or cold and cannot
annul the contradiction of expecting a hot
bath but climbing into a cold one. The philosophical
concept of heat may annul the contradiction
between hot and cold, but it would be a foolish
philosopher who thereby chooses not to wrap
up when it is snowing.
Barth is quite right. In everyday use, concepts
are distinct and do not overlap. e.g. the
genus panthera includes the species puma and
lynx: they are distinct and do not overlap.
Concepts used philosophically do overlap.
For example, it is common in philosophy to
consider the genus ‘judgement’ and to
distinguish the species ‘good’, ‘true’
and ‘beautiful’ within it. It is a quite
proper thing for philosophers to judge things
to be good, true, beautiful. But, crucially,
these species do not exclude each other. They
overlap. Something can be judged to be good
and beautiful, even though ‘good’ and
‘beautiful’ are species of judgement.
Hegel is concerned with, and reflects upon,
such philosophical matters. Hegel’s terms
overlap when they are used philosophically,
but only in these cases. It is not a sign
of his lack of consistency, but an indication
of his logical sophistication.
We can at this point thank Professor Collingwood
for his service and adjourn to consider our
verdict.
It is plain that Barth is not simply wrong
about Hegel. He does not make false claims.
He makes true claims but does not grasp their
significance.
Barth claims, quite reasonably, that Hegel
uses concepts to assert the identity of thinking
of being, to encompass entire scales within
a concept, to annul all contradictions within
a concept, and he frequently permits his concepts
to overlap.
We cannot simply say to Barth, ‘Oh no, mate,
you’ve got Hegel completely wrong’.
He has, in a certain way, got Hegel right.
Barth grasps that what Hegel is doing differs
from the philosophy textbooks with which he
is familiar. Let us briefly review.
For Barth, Hegel’s concept: (1) Hegel asserts
an identity of thinking and being. Check.
(2) it encompasses entire scales, like the
scale of heat. Check. (3) It annuls all contradictions.
Check. (4) There is frequent overlap between
concepts. Check.
So what has Barth to say about our discovery
that Hegel’s common-sense vices are in fact
philosophical virtues?
At this point our peaceful visit to the realm
of philosophical logic must be interrupted
by the harsh realities of Barth’s home life.
We should not allow ourselves to think about
Barth’s work – not even something as majestically
exalted as his relation to Hegel – without
acknowledging its costs. They are severe.
Something was badly missing in my short summary
of Barth’s life at the start of this lecture.
This is an image of Charlotte von Kirschbaum
and Karl Barth, from roughly the time that
the Hegel essay was written.
Their relationship has been a topic of discussion
and speculation for many years, with a strict
division between those who personally knew
the Barth family and its situation and those
who did not. I am surely not alone in having
had conversations with older Professors in
Germany which are frank and unvarnished, but
which end, ‘but this we can never say in
public’.
This period of secrets and rumour is now over,
with the publication in 2008 of intimate letters
between them and, this year in July, the publication
of a clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment
by Professor Christiane Tietz, Professor of
Systematic Theology at the University of Zürich.
Enough is now public that silence is no longer
a respectable option.
Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum met
in 1925. Barth had been married to Nelly since
1913. Karl and Charlotte immediately fell
in love. Von Kirschbaum, 11 years Barth’s
junior, became his secretary, research assistant,
lover, and – from 1929 – she lived in
the Barth household, with the three of them
– Karl, Nelly and Charlotte – in what
he called a Notgemeinschaft zu dritt: something
ambiguous in German, as Tietz points out:
a union of necessity or a union of trouble.
It was awful for all three. Nelly begged Karl
to be faithful to her and to their marriage.
Karl asked Nelly for a divorce and then, when
Nelly agreed, refused to do it. Charlotte
acknowledged that she did not treat Nelly
as she should.
There are some troubling aspects to this relationship,
beyond the relationship itself. The voices
of the women – of Nelly and Charlotte – are
eclipsed, as so often. Karl’s letters are
available to us, but many of Charlotte’s
were destroyed (probably by Karl), and Nelly’s
correspondence is also patchy. It also appears,
in Tietz’ analysis, that both Nelly and
Charlotte each at various times expressed
severe anger and even rage at Karl, and that
he rebuked them for what he called their ‘hysterics’,
and threatened not to engage with them. Karl
preferred his women to suffer quietly. Charlotte
was not paid a salary: she received an allowance.
And she was never properly credited in publications.
Let us return to these figures their last
names and consider its relevance for our discussion.
Von Kirschbaum was intimately involved with
Barth’s research and writing until disease,
probably Alzheimer’s, meant she had to move
into a home. The period when Barth was lecturing
on Hegel in Bonn was exactly the period when
the relationship with Charlotte was settling
into a routine. We cannot say how much of
this essay is Barth and how much is von Kirschbaum.
This is not because we lack evidence, but
because their working relationship was so
intimate. They essay we have is not jointly
authored – Barth would introduce von Kirschbaum
as his secretary, in order to avoid scandal
– it carries the man’s name alone. But
it was certainly jointly written, jointly
drafted and jointly corrected. We are obligated
to acknowledge this publicly.
Our ‘clash of the titans’ is much messier
than one might think. It is no longer a matter
of two great men wrestling in their greatness,
a macho fantasy in any case, but of two thinkers
grappling with a third.
Our problem is the problem of how to interpret
Barth’s and von Kirschbaum’s critique
of Hegel.
Barth and von Kirschbaum are right about what
Hegel does. But they are wrong about how to
assess it. Barth and von Kirschbaum believe
that Hegel claims ‘infinite’ knowledge:
There is no limitation or exaggeration, no
folly or wickedness in the whole range of
real human thinking … which would not be
in principle included in the rational quality
of the concept which conceives (in sich begreifender
Begriff) all reality within itself.
This is theologically catastrophic, for the
theologians. It means that the all-powerful
all-knowing philosopher (who rather resembles
certain conceptions of God, although Barth
and von Kirschbaum do not say this) has a
total perspective on everything. They mock
Hegel for casting
…a key to open every lock, a lever to set
every wheel working at once, an observation
tower from which not only all the lands of
the earth, but the third and seventh heavens,
too, can be surveyed at a glance
Hegel does indeed claim ‘infinite’ knowledge,
but this is not quite as exciting as Barth
and von Kirschbaum mean, or at least not exciting
in the way they think. (I admit I find it
pretty exciting, but then, I am excited by
questions of logic.)
Barth’s and von Kirschbaum’s theological
concerns can be disentangled from his misunderstandings
of Hegel. This is worthwhile because Barth’s
and von Kirschbaum’s concerns surely remain
ours, or ought to.
Barth and von Kirschbaum insist that there
are three focal concepts used of God in theology
that must not be dissolved (in any sense).
God’s sovereignty must not be dissolved
in such a way that God becomes imprisoned
in human language. God’s freedom must not
be dissolved in such a way that God’s actions
become understood as necessary. God’s grace
must not be dissolved in such a way that it
is lost in a humanly specified logic.
These are three good principles, and I believe
any Christian theologian should assent to
them. Barth and von Kirschbaum assent to them.
I assent to them.
The question is whether Hegel needs to be
corrected by them. I do not think he does.
This is because Barth and von Kirschbaum and
Hegel are asking different questions.
Hegel asks a set of logical questions. These
are questions about the function of concepts
when they are used philosophically, as opposed
to their use in everyday common-sense systems
of classification.
Barth and von Kirschbaum ask a set of theological
questions. These are questions about whether
God is God, and not just a plaything of philosophers
and theologians.
It would be true that Hegel’s claims are
bad answers to Barth’s questions. But this
does not arise. Hegel does not ask, let alone
answer, Barth’s questions at all. As for
Barth and von Kirschbaum, they are probably
unable to imagine Hegel’s questions, let
alone answer them.
It is nonetheless important to remember that
Barth’s lecturing on Hegel is contemporary
with the Barmen Declaration of 1934. Consider
this:
We publicly declare before all evangelical
Churches in Germany that what they hold in
common … is grievously imperilled, and with
it the unity of the German Evangelical Church.
This threat consists in the fact that the
theological basis, in which the German Evangelical
Church is united, has been continually and
systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective
by alien principles, on the part of the leaders
and spokesmen of the "German Christians" as
well as on the part of the Church administration.
These are not small matters. They are utterly
urgent. It would thus surely be strange and
wrong for us to dismiss or mock Barth and
von Kirschbaum for their misreading of Hegel.
They hear in Hegel’s own ‘alien principles’
something that they hear elsewhere in their
own time.
And in any case, this reading of Hegel was
surely quite common at the time he was writing,
and the influence of such figures as Kojève,
Hyppolite and others who have transformed
our reading of Hegel was only just beginning
– Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in Paris
date from 1933, almost exactly contemporary
with Barth’s Bonn lectures – much too
early for Barth to be shaped by them.
Moreover, the edition of Hegel’s Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion that Barth and
von Kirschbaum cite (the Lasson edition of
the 1920s) is significantly inferior to scholarly
editions we have today. I checked the library
catalogues for the universities of Münster
and Bonn, and their Hegel holdings from this
period seem rather patchy. We need to be attentive
to this.
The reading of Hegel I have begun to outline
here – a reading in logic – is made possible
because of first-rate and affordable critical
editions of Hegel and the work of R.G. Collingwood
from the 1930s. Neither was available to Barth
and von Kirschbaum and it is absurd to judge
them by the standards of thinking that depends
on those unavailable resources.
Is that it, then? Are we to say that in the
end Hegel and Barth and von Kirschbaum ask
different questions, and that Hegel’s interpreters
are hampered and obstructed by their failure
to understand that he is reading texts about
the logical structure of concepts?
No. What we have is less a conclusion and
more a research proposal. If it is the case,
and it is, that Hegel is misread by theologians;
if it is the case, and it is, that this misreading
arises from a failure to consider technical
questions of logic; if theologians routinely
read respectable logical claims as disastrous
theological claims – this is the argument
of my book on Hegel – then we have a problem
and a solution.
In fact we have two problems requiring two
solutions.
The first problem is one of interpreting Hegel.
There is clearly a need for a commentary on
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
that attends properly to technical questions
of logic, as well as to the theological landscape
that Hegel is traversing. This is a significant
undertaking. I have been most fortunate to
have been welcomed here to a professorial
post in philosophical theology in Birmingham,
and I plan to make good use of it by writing
such a commentary. I admit I am intimidated
by the scale of the challenge and am conscious
that there are probably good reasons why others
have not taken it up. It is going to need
a big grant.
The second problem is that of intellectual
formation. Faculties of theology and philosophy
are typically separate, just as they were
in Barth’s time. The two disciplines have
continued on different paths. The University
of Berlin created a new, independent, faculty
of philosophy (the first in the world, I think)
thus laying down a challenge to the three
medieval faculties of theology, law, and medicine.
These days it is less of a challenge and more
of a problem, just as it clearly was for Barth
and von Kirschbaum.
Theologians who want to interpret Hegel are
not well served by an emphatic separation
between these disciplines. If you are interested
in theology and you want to study Hegel seriously,
this will require a solid foundation in theology
and in philosophy, including questions of
logic.
If one starts to imagine the kind of double
formation necessary, at undergraduate and
graduate level, the difficulties become at
least easy to enumerate. Reading Hegel requires
three distinct but related tracks of competence.
Two are obvious. One needs to study German
Idealism at least from Kant onwards, and a
grasp of theology sufficient to grant familiarity
with debates about Christology and Trinitarian
theology in the long tradition. The third
is equally important, but requires strong
institutional support and organisation. To
understand Hegel one needs sure footing in
classical Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle,
and in the ways in which its concerns are
taken up in later periods. The work of Collingwood,
on which this lecture depends, is for example
undertaken as commentary and development of
the Greek tradition (something quite normal
in the 1930s but less normal today), taking
into account developments in logic in the
modern period. It is a challenge to fashion
the kind of graduate training that would furnish
this kind of facility in philosophy. A challenge,
certainly, but by no means impossible.
I suppose that this is why universities appoint
professors. And I look forward to discovering
what can be done here in Birmingham, in collaboration
with my many able colleagues, both in theology
and in philosophy. We shall see.
