- Thank you very much, Judy,
for the kind introduction.
I'd of course like to
take this opportunity
to thank Judy and Liz
and the entire staff
here at Radcliffe for
this wonderful opportunity
to be a part of such a
fantastic community of scholars
and artists and writers
of this-- it's really
been wonderful for me
and for my project,
I especially appreciate
the congenial tone of all
of our discussions in
this forum and also
in our private seminars.
Thank you very much for that.
I've had a lot of discussions
with some of the fellows
here are some of the colleagues
during this initial time here,
and I get the sense a number
of you have been a little bit
traumatized by Hegel due to
some experience you've had
as an undergraduate, perhaps.
And I understand
that sense of trauma.
I want to ask you today to bear
with me for just a little bit
here, and see if I can present
to you a picture of Hegel which
is perhaps a bit more
intelligible and a bit more
interesting, perhaps a bit
more compelling than the one
that you were
presented with before.
So if I enjoin you just
to put aside for a moment
whatever bad memories
you might have
or whatever picture
of Hegel you might
have had in your mind
up until now, let's
see if we can start over again.
During Hegel's tenure
in Berlin from 1818
till his death in 1831, he
delivered his lecture course
on the philosophy of
religion four times,
in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831.
In these lectures,
Hegel's ostensibly
trying to make a case for the
truth of Christianity, which
is more or less what we would
expect from somebody who's
a professor at the
main university
in Prussia during the 1820s.
It makes perfect sense.
I think we have to recall that
during this time in the kingdom
of Prussia, there didn't
exist freedom of religion
as we know it today.
It was straightforwardly
illegal to call into question
any of the key points
of Christian dogma.
And Hegel had seen some of his
own colleagues unceremoniously
fired for having appeared to
have done things of that sort.
Everything that Hegel
published during this time,
he had to submit to the Prussian
censors for their approval
first.
So sometimes Hegel's
often caricatured
as a prototypical
Prussian philosopher who's
writing a defense of
the Prussian state,
but this is a complete
misunderstanding.
This is one of the
many Hegel myths
that one will find sometimes
in the secondary literature.
Hegel himself was
not a Prussian.
He was born in Stuttgart.
He came from the Duchy of
Wurttemberg which at that time
was, of course, a
completely different country
with its own customs
and traditions.
Hegel himself was always
a foreigner in Prussia,
and his students often noted
his thick Wurttembergian accent.
And his colleagues
sometimes tended to snub him
or to exclude them from noble
society because of this.
Now while Hegel's stated
goal in these lectures
is to defend the truth of
Christianity, in my project,
I submit that if we
read between the lines,
we can see in fact he's engaged
in a project which is much more
ambitious and in some
ways more interesting.
He notes that human
beings have worshipped
the divine in virtually
every form imaginable.
So anything at all can be,
and has been, reverenced
as a god or a divinity.
And this, at first glance,
can appear very confusing.
I know when I teach students
introduction to mythology,
the first time they hear
about the Greek myths,
they can't make any
sense of it at all.
It strikes them as very strange
when they hear these stories
about the Greek gods and
goddesses and all the things
they are doing.
It doesn't seem to make any
sense whatsoever to them.
So Hegel's deeper
project is to try
to discern some rationality,
some logic, some logos,
in this apparently chaotic
manifold of myths, beliefs,
and religious practices.
He wants to find some
basic principles that
can help us to
understand why it is
that humans conceive of the
gods in the way that they do.
And so when I talk about the
logic of the gods in my title,
this is what I'm talking about.
Hegel wants to
help us understand
this logos, this rationality.
The first edition
of Hegel's Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion
was published in 1832,
just a few months
after Hegel's death.
It was edited by one of his
students, this guy Philipp
Marheineke, who
was a theologian.
And what Marheineke
did is he simply went
around and combined--
asked his fellow students
if they had lecture
notes to these lectures
that Hegel had given
through the years,
got those together, combined
them, and collated them
to make a single running text.
And so when we talk
about Hegel's Lectures
on the Philosophy
of Religion, we're
not strictly speaking
about, talking about a text
by Hegel's own hand.
These are student notes
which have been put together
in different ways, and
the philology of this
is extremely complex.
I won't go into it,
but take it from me,
this is a complex matter
and different editions
follow different
principles, a long story.
But it was this initial
edition by Marheineke in 1832
which played a crucial role
in the history of reception
since it was really the focal
point for the critical debates
surrounding Hegel's philosophy.
In many ways, it
was the key text
that caused the split among
Hegel's followers, that
created the schools known
to the history of philosophy
as Right and Left Hegelianism.
Again, we don't need to get
into the details of that,
but suffice it to say that
the debates about Hegel's
philosophy of religion
defined philosophy
and theology in the
German speaking world
in the 1830s and 1840s.
And so this was a text that was
read by thinkers such as Ludwig
Feuerbach, David Friedrich
Strauss, Karl Marx, Bruno
Bauer, Soren Kierkegaard.
All of the important
figures of that period
read this text carefully, and
it played an important role
for them.
Now the basic structure
of these lectures
follows a threefold scheme.
For Hegel, everything's
about threes, right?
We start with The Concept of
Religion and then the section
The Determinant Religion
or sometimes translated
The Definite
Religion-- this is one
we will look at in more
detail-- and finally
what he calls The Absolute
Religion or The Consummate
Religion in another translation.
The first section
now, The Concept
of Religion-- here Hegel
explores the nature of God
in the abstract.
So the idea is that
God is a concept
and each different field
for him corresponds
to a specific concept.
So God is the concept
that corresponds
to the field of
religion in the same way
that, for example, beauty is
a concept that corresponds
to art or aesthetics
or in the way
that justice would
be the concept that
corresponds to law.
And so here Hegel
wants to explore,
what do we mean
intuitively when we use
this word God or the divine?
What is that as a concept to us?
So independent of
any concrete religion
or any religious tradition,
just what does that term mean?
So that's what he's occupied
with in that first section.
Then in the second
section, he moves
from that abstract concept
to the concrete conception.
So he wants to look at all
the different religions
of the world and
see, concretely,
how have those different
religions conceived
of the divine in different ways?
And so here he goes through.
He gives us a long story about
the development of the world
religions, and at the
beginning of each chapter,
he tries to say, what does that
religion understand by God?
What is the concept of the
divinity in that religion?
And so here you can
even see that we
can understand The
Concept of Religion
as representing the
universal, right?
What is God as a
general concept?
And then The
Determinant Religion
representing the
particular, right,
so looking at individual
conceptions of God.
And then he thinks that the
third section, The Absolute
Religion, this is his defense
of Christianity, where he
thinks these two come together.
And the historical
story he wants to tell,
it's leading up to
Christianity and this
is the Hegel as
Christian apologist part
that we will return to.
The middle section, The
Determinant Religion,
is where it gets a
little more complex.
He divides this into two large
sections, the natural religion,
or religions of nature, and
the religions of spirit.
Each of the world religions
is determined and organized
for him in accordance with
its specific conception
of what the divine is.
So the movement that
Hegel wants to trace
is intended to be
a progressive one,
starting with the most basic,
moving to the most complex.
To use his language, he has kind
of a funny way of putting this,
that human beings are
emerging from nature
as they're slowly
developing different aspects
of human culture.
And so his question,
you can understand it
as being how did
human beings get
from certain early conceptions
of the gods to the conceptions
that we have today?
I guess in the same way,
I suppose, anthropologists
ask how do we get
from stone tools
to, whatever, rocket
ships or computers?
So now the first category,
natural religion, the divine
is conceived of as
an object of nature.
So anything at all, like
the sun, the moon, a river,
an animal, a plant,
anything of this sort
would fall for him
under the category
of the philosophy of nature.
In contrast to that, we have
the religions of spirit,
and on these accounts,
they're the conception
of the god as a self-conscious
agent or entity.
It's an anthropomorphic
conception.
These are the
forms of polytheism
we see, for example, in the
Greek and Roman religion.
In the secondary
literature on this,
there's quite a number
of books that treat
Hegel as a Christian apologist.
Many theologians just go
to that final section,
and they ignore everything else.
But I think this is a
mistake because this section
on the determinant
religion, which
has really been quite neglected,
is compelling in many ways.
But I think what has
stood in the way of people
looking at this
more seriously is
what we call in Hegel studies
Hegel's teleology, that
is this end toward which the
development is progressing,
or to put a finer point
on it, his Eurocentrism.
We're all leading
up to Christianity,
and everything looks like
it's subordinated to that.
And so most of these studies on
Hegel's philosophy of religion,
they want to skip over
that part and just see
what he says about
Christianity and not
worry so much about this
uncomfortable question
of telos.
And of course that's
understandable.
It's quite unfashionable
to talk like that today.
Nobody wants to say that the
history of or development
of world religions
leads up to be
a culminating point
in Christianity which
is the only true religion.
I mean, that offends our
modern sensibilities.
And so, yeah,
understandably, people
have shied a little bit
away from this topic.
But I think what
I want to suggest
is that the matter's not
quite so straightforward.
I think when we hear this
claim about the end of religion
in Hegel, that conjures
up in our minds
a great number of things about,
OK, what a person who would
think that must have thought.
And what I want to submit
to your judgment here
is that in Hegel's case,
this is not the case.
That our modern
sensibilities simply
do not square with the
sensibilities at that time.
And let me give you three quick
reasons for why I think that.
The first is that Hegel devotes
a great deal of time and effort
to understanding these
other world religions,
and it's perfectly
clear that he doesn't
think that because those are
not the culminating religions,
that they're simply
meaningless or worthless.
On the contrary, he's
extremely engaged in this,
in exploring those
other religions.
And far from dismissing it, at
the beginning of his lectures,
Hegel actually
warns his auditors
about prejudice
towards this material.
And this is what he says.
I mean, imagine this,
like the first day
of the semester at the
University of Berlin
and all these
excited students come
in for Hegel's lectures
and Hegel's attentive
to this issue.
And so he says this
just as a caveat right
at the very beginning
of the lectures.
He says, it's undoubtedly true
that the definite religions
of the various peoples
often enough exhibit
the most distorted and confused
ideas of the divine being,
and likewise of duties and
relations expressed in worship.
But-- here's the key
point-- we must not
treat the matter so
lightly and conceive of it
in a superficial
manner, as to reject
these ideas and these rights
as superstition, error,
and deceit.
On the contrary,
something higher
is necessary,
namely to recognize
the meaning, the truth,
and the connection
with truth, in short, to get to
know what is rational in them.
They are human beings who hit
upon such religions, therefore,
there must be reason
in them, and amidst
all that is accidental in
them, a higher necessity.
Now we can see here that Hegel--
it's very easy to read over
this kind of a
passage, but I think
we need to put this in
its historical context.
And when you do, you see this
is actually quite striking.
Let's remember now,
this is the time
when Europe was just
beginning for the first time
to learn at all about these
different non-European
religions.
And this process,
as we all know,
was accompanied with a
great deal of suspicion,
a great deal of ignorance, and a
great deal of prejudice, right?
And so some of which
Hegel presumably
saw in his own
classroom, and so here he
is, right at the
beginning of his lectures,
admonishing his students to
put aside their prejudice
and to take a serious
look at this material.
There is an inherent
rationality in religious belief
and practice,
regardless of how odd
or how foreign it might
strike us or our intuitions
at first glance.
Although there is a
teleology in the development
of that religion,
Hegel's not implying
here that everything prior to
that is simply meaningless.
On the contrary, he's making
a plea, which at the time
was quite progressive,
for a careful study
of the non-European religions.
A second point that
I think follows along
with this is if you look at
the field of the philosophy
of religion in his time, it
was, as one would expect,
extremely Eurocentric.
If you look at the-- well, I've
spent a lot of time on this--
but just briefly, look at
the philosophy of religion
of his immediate
predecessors, the philosophers
Kant and Fichte.
If you look at their
philosophy of religion,
it's all about the
Judeo-Christian tradition.
They basically never talk
about any other religion.
It's extremely limited.
So for them,
philosophy of religion,
it's about understanding
the Christian tradition, by
and large, whereas
for Hegel, he's
really sort of the first one
to have made a conscious effort
to include these
non-European religions
and to really take
them seriously and make
that a central part
of the discussion.
This is particularly
striking when--
look at even to this very day,
how Eurocentric this field is,
right?
And so in this
sense as well, Hegel
seems to be on the
progressive side of things
during his own time.
And the third point
I wanted to bring up
has to do with
Hegel's relationship
to this guy, Georg
Friedrich Creuzer.
Creuzer was important in
the rise of Asian studies
in the German
states at the time.
From 1810 to 1812, he published,
in four volumes, this book,
Symbolik und Mythologie der
alten Volker, besonders der
Griechen, Symbolism
and Mythology
of the Ancient Peoples,
Especially the Greeks.
This was an important and
extremely controversial
book at the time.
Creuzer began his studies in
Jena in the 1790s, and in 1804
was appointed to a professorship
in philology and ancient
history at the
University of Heidelberg.
There, he became known as
one of the leading figures
of Heidelberg Romanticism.
Through his contact with the
other Romantics in this circle,
Creuzer, although originally
a classicist by training,
he became quite interested
in the mythology of India
and other Eastern religions.
And this was the beginning of
the inspiration for his book.
Creuzer's approach to religion
foreshadowed Hegel's in a lot
of important ways.
He saw a general development in
history of the different world
religions, and he saw them
as developing from earlier
stages to later ones.
And he saw different
beliefs in cults
being transferred from
one culture to another
and then being reshaped
in different ways.
And Creuzer's
comparative mythology
attempted to
demonstrate that there
were important aspects of Greek
mythology which originally
came from eastern sources, such
as Egypt, Persia, and India.
And this called into question
the importance and originality
of Greek culture, which
the tradition was,
of course, had long celebrated.
And this was a highly
controversial claim
at the time.
This was the period of
Neoclassicism of Philhellenism
in the German states.
And Creuzer's view
seemed to completely
undermine what was the
assumed superiority
or primacy of Western culture
and to raise these Eastern
religions to a new
elevated status.
This book set off quite
a testy controversy
that took place
during the time when
Hegel was lecturing in Berlin.
And Creuzer's views
were simply rejected
and there were
attempts to portray him
as kind of a fanatic or
an incompetent scholar.
There was an enormous degree
of resentment built up
among the classicists,
that Creuzer had,
in a certain sense,
betrayed his own background
as a classical philologist, and
they regarded his enthusiasm
for ancient India as
like high treason.
They had no patience
for this at all.
Hegel knew Creuzer personally.
They were colleagues
when Hegel was
at Berlin from 1816 to 1818.
That was immediately before
he went to-- I'm sorry.
They were colleagues
in Heidelberg
immediately before
Hegel went to Berlin.
Hegel's first biographer,
Karl Rosenkranz,
especially emphasized
Hegel's sympathy for Creuzer
during this Heidelberg period.
And this relationship
is attested
to in a number of
different letters
that Hegel writes to
Creuzer while he's in Berlin
and while he's giving lectures.
And he tells him quite openly
how inspired he is by his book
and how he's making use
of them in his lectures.
And Hegel says this also
explicitly in the lectures
and the manuscripts
that we have,
and this is also something
we have to fully appreciate
the force of these
passages, you have
to put it in the
historical context,
where imagine all of
this controversy going on
in the background.
Everybody in the classroom
knows who this guy Creuzer is
and they know he's
under fire because
of all these philologists
who are mad at him, right?
And then there's Hegel.
He's saying, my friend
Creuzer says this,
and I think he's
right-- at the time,
enormously contentious
thing to say.
So what are these--
these passages,
one could easily read
right over if you're not
familiar with the
historical background,
but here, Hegel's
clearly taking a stand
on Creuzer's side
of the argument.
And Creuzer was a major
influence, I think,
on Hegel's understanding and
general approach to religion.
In particular, he gave
Hegel a greater appreciation
for the religions of
the East and this then
drew Hegel into these
contemporary controversies
surrounding the value and
the status of this newly
discovered material.
Hegel's often known to be a
great critic of the Romantics,
but he was also sympathetic
to their attempt
to understand the deeper
meaning of the Asian religions.
Both Hegel and
Creuzer, they wanted
to trace the links between
the different world religions
and to establish a
continuous development
from the religions of the
East through the Greeks
and the Romans.
And on this score, in
contrast to many scholars
then and for that
matter now, Hegel,
he doesn't have any
problems with the suggestion
that key aspects of Greek
culture and religion
came from Egypt, and key
aspects of Egyptian culture
and religion came from,
for example, Mesopotamia
or from Ethiopia.
And he's quite open to
these sorts of connections.
And so all of this is simply to
show that it may be the stated
goal of Hegel's lectures
is to defend Christianity,
but there's a lot more there
than what we would immediately
take to be implied
in that simple claim.
He has enormous interest
in this other material
and is also keen to give it
a philosophical analysis.
OK, well what is
the theory here?
I hope this doesn't
bring back bad memories
from your undergraduate days.
For Hegel, religion
operates at the level
of what he calls spirit.
By this, he simply
means human culture,
anything that is the
product of the human mind.
So the gods are the product
of the collective human mind.
They're not the idiosyncratic
result of specific individuals.
And so this means that when
we're talking about religion,
that the different
religions follow
different nationalistic lines.
So it's groups of people
who have their own gods, who
have specific gods.
So specific peoples or nations
each have their own set
of gods or deities.
So the Greeks have
specifically Greek gods,
the Egyptians have
specifically Egyptian gods.
And so Hegel's account
here of religion,
it follows a pattern which
is quite similar or parallel
to the account he wants to give
of the development of world
history.
The notion of the divine
that a people develops,
according to Hegel,
is naturally going
to be a reflection of its
own values, its own culture,
and its own self-conception.
So you can think of this as
whatever a given people can
think of as being of the
highest or the grandest,
the most sublime at that
given point in history.
Well that's represented
in their religion.
That's their conception
of the divine.
But this means that those
conceptions, of course,
are going to be culturally
and historically conditioned.
One silly example
I use sometimes
to illustrate this
to my students
is think of an older
science fiction film
that you've seen,
perhaps, and think
of how the writers at
that time tried to imagine
how the future would look.
What would it be like if we
had this fantastic technology?
We could do anything
at all, right?
And then compare that
with what we have today.
Very often, we sort of laugh
at those old films, right?
Remember like Captain Kirk
with the communicator, right?
I mean at the time when
that was written, probably
like in the '50s or '60s,
whenever that show was on,
that was just a grand
idea of what technology
could do one day.
Talk to the Starship
on the communicator
from the planet, right?
Whereas today, I
think the crudest form
of cell phone you
can buy for $10 far
surpasses the
communicator, right?
It's this choice of something
about the contingency
of the human imagination.
It's fixed in the certain
time and place, historically.
And so from this, it
follows, according to Hegel,
that the conception
of the divine,
which indeed constitutes
a part of culture,
is going to be in
a certain sense
a reflection of
that given people.
And so through their
different cultural artifacts,
the way he puts it,
the people given people
objectifies itself to itself.
So you're producing some
external thing and viewing it,
and that is a reflection of
what you are as a culture.
And the conception of the
gods is one such artifact.
So from this analysis,
I think it's clear
why Hegel thinks that
a historical study
of the concrete religions
is quite important.
And he explains that
the goal is then
to study religions
in history to see
how these different historical
peoples characterize
the divinities and to understand
that as a function of how they
conceived of themselves,
that is, what they thought
it amount to to be human.
Now given this, that the
conception of the divine
reflects and corresponds to a
people's conception of itself,
it seems clear that this
self-conception is historically
mutable and needs to
be traced through time
and then this is something
that gives his analysis
this historical dimension.
You know there's, of course,
another set of lectures,
his lectures on the philosophy
of history-- similar story,
student notes which were
collected and published
posthumously.
In these lectures, Hegel traces
the story of human history
in terms of one people
and after another.
I'm sure some of you
have read some of this.
The key thesis
there that he tries
to defend that everybody
recites to themselves
is, OK, the development
of human history
is the realization
of human freedom.
So through the course
of time, humanity
is becoming more and more free.
OK, I mean, any undergraduate
can recite that for you,
but what does it mean, right?
This is, of course,
the big question.
Lots that have been
written about this.
My short version is
something like this.
Forget for a moment
the idea of freedom.
That can mean many
different things,
as every good politician knows.
Think of concepts such as
individuality or subjectivity.
That's the kind of thing
he's talking about.
What he's trying to trace
there is a historical movement
which begins with a
time where individuals
were subordinated to
custom, to tradition,
standard ways of doing
things, and that there
was no recognition of the
value of the individual.
And so it's only through
the course of history,
Hegel wants to say that this
conception of individuality
starts to be recognized
and starts to gain ground.
And so I think that's
the kind of thing
that you can talk-- there's
an element of freedom involved
in that, of course, to
what it is to be free.
We think today that
it has something
to do with what we are as
individuals, of course,
but I think it's a clearer
way to think about it.
And so the idea is
that in the past,
these traditional
customs were oppressive.
People were simply obliged
to go along with things
because, well, that
was what the family,
the tribe, the state,
whoever simply dictated.
It didn't matter what
the individual thought.
If they were inclined to do
it or not, it didn't matter.
Your opinion does not ask.
You simply do it.
This is your role.
This is the realm of what
Hegel calls zeitlichkeit,
and this is a German
word that just
means, for Hegel, the
larger sphere of customs
and traditions that he thinks
people were subordinate to.
And Hegel's own term
is subjective freedom,
this development
of the individual
that I think is
more intuitive to us
today, where gradually
through the course of history,
it's realized that each
and every human being
is valuable and
important on their own,
that there's
something irreducible
about the individual.
And this realm of
subjectivity, individuality,
is something that only
comes to be recognized
in the course of history.
Here, it's helpful
to think of things
like the idea of human rights.
Human rights is
not something that
was there at the beginning
of history, right,
and so this is an idea.
It's a concept that
developed, took a long time
to develop and to refine.
Think of things
like the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen
or the United Nations charters.
These are documents which
reflect a certain conception
of what it is to
be a human being
and that celebrate a certain
form of irreducibility of what
it is to be an individual.
In earlier times, of course,
that conception was not
present, I mean not in
that articulated way.
This is the kind of
thing Hegel has in mind.
If you want to turn
the point around, look
at it on the negative
side, Hegel's
quite critical of a number
of different institutions
historically which
he thinks have
stood in the way of the
development of human freedom
or individuality.
So he's quite critical of,
for example, the Indian caste
system.
He's critical of
the slave trade.
He's critical of the
anti-Semitic laws
in the Prussia of his own
day, which exclude Jews
from certain legal rights.
So all of these things
are, to his mind,
in complete contradiction to the
principle of subjective freedom
because they undermine the
dignity and absolute value
of the individual.
So the long story Hegel
wants to tell them
about the development
of subjective freedom
in his lectures on the
philosophy of history
is then, you can see, intimately
connected with the story
he wants to tell about
the development of world
religions in his lectures on
the philosophy of religion.
So the culture and the
self-conception of a people,
it's going to be limited by
its degree of, in his words,
freedom or individuality,
subjectivity
that it's achieved,
its awareness of that.
Since the culture or
self-conception is constituent
of a conception of the
divine in any given people,
it therefore follows that
the notion of freedom,
individuality,
subjectivity, it's
also bound up with the way in
which the gods are conceived.
Well that's the theory.
Let's go and look
at some examples
and hopefully this will
become a bit more intuitive.
We saw that that Hegel begins
in his categorization with what
he's calling the
religions of nature.
One of the religions
of nature is Hinduism.
What do we see in Hinduism?
The conception of
the god, Brahma,
who's the creative power of
nature, and anything in nature
can be perceived of
as having this power.
And so for this
reason, the Hindus
worship all sorts of natural
objects, like the river Ganges.
They worship different plants.
They worship
animals, all of which
are thought to have this
divine element in them
because they have the force
of nature within them.
There's seemingly
infinite number
of avatars or manifestations
of the abstract divine.
Here, we have the sacred cow
or Hanuman, the monkey god, one
of the heroes of the Ramayana.
Another of the other
religions of nature
is Zoroastrianism, the religion
of the ancient Persians.
The Zoroastrians worshipped
as a divinity light or fire,
and so they had fire
altars that were
central to their
religious ceremonies.
And again, very straightforward
why Hegel thinks this
is a natural religion, right?
Light and fire, these
are products of nature.
They're not the product
of the human mind.
They're out there.
We can find them in nature.
So we have two examples of
what he talks about in terms
of natural religion,
then we move
to his conception of the
Egyptian religion, which
he thinks is a
transitory religion.
It moves us away from
the natural religion
and into the
religions of spirit.
And he thinks-- he gives
us lots of examples of why
he thinks this is transitory.
One of these has to do with
the Egyptian conception
of the immortality of the soul,
which he thinks is absolutely
a key moment in the development
of a religious thought.
And he illustrates that
with images like this.
This is the Papyrus known as
the Book of the Dead by Hunefer.
And what's going on here?
We have the Osiris, the god
of the dead who is sitting
on the right on the throne.
Here on the left,
we have-- I guess
this is supposed to be
read from left to right.
We have the god of the
underworld, Anubis,
with the head of a dog who's
leading in the dead guy.
And then in the
next scene, we see
Anubis is weighing on the
scales the heart of the dead guy
against a feather.
And so the idea is that if
you have a very heavy heart,
then you were a morally
wretched person, and you lose.
You don't get to enter
the realm of the dead.
If that's the case, then
this other god here,
who has the head
of like a crocodile
and the body of partly of
a hippopotamus, Ammitt,
he will eat the heart
and that person,
his soul dies, as
the heart is thought
to be the locus of the soul.
Then we have the god
Thoth, with the head
of an ibis, who's writing
down what's happening,
recording the guy's name and
whatever, social security
number, making sure that we
have the right person here.
And it looks like he passes the
test because you can see him.
Then he's being led
by the god Horus
into the realm of the dead here.
And now what's Hegel's point
with this kind of a story?
He's saying that the
idea of judging people
for their moral
worth and holding
them responsible
for their actions
implies a developed
conception of individuality.
Individuals and
their moral decisions
are now thought to have
an importance in value
that he thinks was not
formally recognized.
So the moral life of
each individual person
is important enough
in this sense
to warrant its own
legal proceedings.
It's important enough that
it even interests the gods.
Now suddenly the moral
life of individuals
is an enormous importance
which accrues to this.
And Hegel thinks that
the intuitive ideas
that we have today about
justice, about morality,
about individual freedom,
he thinks all of this
can be traced back in part
to this original Egyptian
conception of immortality.
He thinks all that arises
here for the first time.
Another important characteristic
of the Egyptian gods
is that they're mixed entities.
They contain a human element
and an animal element.
The Egyptian divinities, they're
not purely gods of nature,
like the sacred
cow of the Hindus
or the light of the Persians.
There's an element of
the animal present,
but now for the
first time, there's
also a human element,
which is introduced into it
and mixed together with it.
And we can find all sorts of
examples of the sort of thing
Hegel's talking about here.
His favorite example is
probably that of the Sphinx.
What's a sphinx?
The body of a lion and
the head of a human being.
But most of the Egyptian
deities reversed this.
They have a human
body and then the head
of some kind of an animal.
So, for example,
the sun god of Ra
is represented with
the head of a hawk.
Here we have Sobeck with the
head of a crocodile, Khnum,
the head of a ram.
This is also true of
the many female deities
that we have in
Egyptian religion.
Here we have the
female deity Sekhmet,
who has the head of a lion.
There's also Bastet, who
has the head of a cat,
and Tawaret, who has the
head of a hippopotamus.
Hegel also discusses,
on this motif
of mixed figures,
one of the most
famous of the Egyptian
gods, Anubis, we saw before,
has the body of a human
being, the head of a jackal.
And since Anubis is
said to have created
important aspects of human
affairs, such as science
or the art of
mummification, we would
have expected him to have a
completely anthropomorphic
form, right?
After all, it's only human
beings who have science.
But this is not the
way he's depicted.
He's depicted with
the head of a dog.
And so Hegel's way
of reading this
is that the Egyptians,
they have recognized
a certain aspect of
this is being divine,
but it's still bound
up with nature somehow.
We can find a similar
oddity in the deity Thoth.
This is the god who
has the head of an ibis
and the body of a man.
Thoth is said to be the
inventor of hieroglyphics
and is the god of
writing and wisdom.
So here, we can see he's
writing something on the tablet.
And once again, given this,
we would expect this god also
to have a fully human
appearance, since it's
only humans, after
all, who have writing.
And thus it's odd that he
has the head of an ibis
and that sometimes he's
portrayed as a baboon.
So according to
Hegel, the Egyptians
have reached a level where they
regard certain human activities
as divine, but they've not
yet regard to these things
as entirely the work of the
human mind or the human spirit.
That natural element is
still attached to them.
And so for Hegel, the importance
of these mixed figures
is that they arise at
a time when there's
a conception of spirit, a
certain conception of spirit
which corresponds to a certain
conception of the divine.
The Egyptians have begun to
attain a level, according
to him, where their
self-conception allows
them to conceive of the divine
as a self-conscious subject.
And it's for this reason
that their duties have
certain human characteristics.
Therefore, there's
a need to move away
from the representations of
the divine in terms of animals
or other objects of nature.
And this is important for
Hegel because this then
marks that transition from
the religions of nature
to what Hegel calls the
religions of spirit.
This moves us to then the Greek
religion, Greek polytheism,
which is one of the
religions of spirit.
Hegel argues that we have the
same movement here that we
saw from nature to spirit,
which takes place not just
at this broad level
of the different world
religions as they
progress historically,
but also within the
individual world religions.
Kind of a funny thought,
but his point here
is that we can see the
Greek religion itself
going through those same
stages that we just traced.
And so this means that if you
want to look at it this way,
whatever criticisms he has
of the Asian religions,
he also has of the Greek
religions at an earlier stage.
So according to Greek
mythology as we know it by,
for example, Hesiod, we
have the first generation
of the gods, which
was produced by Chaos
and was rather limited.
Then after this
first generation,
comes a larger group
known as the Titans, who
were the offspring of Gaia,
the goddess of the earth,
and Uranus, the god
of heaven, right?
So everything between earth
and heaven is the universe.
So according to Hegel,
these earlier gods
represent gods of nature.
They're natural
forces, primarily.
From the Titans then come
the well-known generation
of the Olympians,
who are led by Zeus.
The Olympians, for
Hegel, represent gods
not of nature but of spirit.
The shift from the
Titans to the Olympians
is portrayed mythologically
as a war of the gods.
Hegel recalls the myth,
again, portrayed in Hesiod,
of how the Titans who
were led by Kronos
were overthrown by Zeus
and the Olympian gods.
So Zeus revolts against
his father Kronos
and establishes a new reign.
The war of the gods represents
symbolically a movement
from nature to spirit.
So the old gods of
nature are supplanted
by the new Olympian gods, which
are far more anthropomorphic.
I think you can see this.
I mean, if you know anything
at all about Greek mythology
and you just read
through these names,
you can usually
associate something,
kind of an idea of
personality or in a story
with the ones with
the Olympians,
whereas these other ones,
it's a little bit hazier,
that they don't seem to
have that same degree
of personification.
They don't have
developed personalities
or individualities in
quite the same way.
Hegel gives us several
examples of how
this shift in focus
from nature to spirit
is seen in the conception
of individual gods.
He points out that
the Olympians maintain
some of the natural
powers like the Titans,
but then new powers,
significantly new powers,
are added to reflect the
development of spirit
or human culture.
So, for example,
Zeus is like Uranus
in that he's still responsible
for weather phenomena,
like rain, thunder,
lightning, things like that.
But he surpasses Uranus
because he's also--
he gets new quality.
He's responsible for the
state and for civic life, that
is, human culture.
So the Titans represent merely
these natural forces and not
yet more developed
individual personalities.
This is also the case with the
god Oceanus, who was merely
[INAUDIBLE] from the
earlier group of gods,
from the Titans, who
represents the symbol
for the force of the sea.
By contrast, the analogous
god among the Olympians,
that is Poseidon, has
other characteristics
that transcend the
merely natural power.
In addition to
being the wild force
of the sea like his
predecessor, Poseidon also
has qualities associated
with human life and culture,
for example, the
building or construction
or the breeding of horses.
The comparison of these
two generations of gods
represents for
Hegel, symbolically,
the movement of religion from
natural religion to spirit.
And here I think
you can see if you
look at some of the
images, the ancient images,
you can see the kind of
thing that Hegel is talking.
For example, here
in this mosaic.
You see strange imagery.
We have Poseidon
riding the chariot
through the waves,
strange image,
the fish swimming around.
And below him, we have
Oceanus and his wife Tethys.
I look at the way in which
these divinities are portrayed.
You look at Poseidon, he
looks like a Greek warrior,
looks like a strong guy.
He's mastered certain elements
of human culture, right?
He's riding a chariot,
human technology.
He's trained horses.
Down below here with Oceanus,
this is not the case.
First off, he's in this
subordinate position.
He's been exiled into
limbus in the fringes,
and he no longer plays
a significant role.
But look at the way in
which he's portrayed.
His lower body, actually not in
the picture, is that of a fish.
You have this eel or serpent
thing sort of wandering along.
And if you look on his head,
he has the claws of a crab
or a lobster or
something like that.
He's still nature, right?
He's not quite made it to a
fully human or anthropomorphic
conception.
He's still bound up
with that nature,
and that natural conception.
Another example that Hegel
gives of how the Greeks have
advanced beyond the
realm of is their use
of animals as symbols.
And here, we can compare
the different images
that we've seen before
with the religions
that Hegel's traced so far.
If you'll just
recall those images
that we've looked at before.
We have the sacred
cow of the Hindus,
where the animals themselves
are something sacred.
Or for the Egyptians, we
have like the god of Horus,
who has the head of
a hawk or a falcon.
It's a mixed image, so
there's something sacred
about the human and
the animal, right?
They're both together.
Now compare those
images to these.
Now something entirely
different is going on here.
We have Zeus, who's
entirely anthropomorphic.
He looks like a human
being, but what's happened?
The animal is reduced.
The animal's become a
sidekick, a mascot, a symbol.
He's portrayed with the eagle.
So according to
Hegel's story, the bird
has gone from being a full blown
deity to a symbol in the course
of the development of time.
And parallel to
that development,
it's the human form
which has emerged
as a form of the divine.
And this is not just
sort of happenstance.
I didn't just pick
these examples.
You can find these all
over Greek mythology.
Here, you have Athena, who
has the owl, Aphrodite,
the sparrow.
The other Greek
gods and goddesses
have their favorite
animals as symbols as well.
We saw Poseidon with the horse.
We could also make
the case that we
can see a vestige of this
even in the Gospel writers,
right, who are also portrayed
with animals symbols.
We have another contrast that
Hegel makes with the Greeks
in Asian religion in terms
of the god or goddess
Artemis or Diana.
He goes back and forth
between the Greek and Roman
designation.
This doesn't matter.
Here he writes, the
Diana of Ephesus
is still Asiatic, and is
represented with many breasts
and covered with
images of animals.
She has, in fact, as the
basis of her character,
natural life, the producing
and nourishing power of nature.
On the other hand,
Diana of the Greeks
is the huntress
who kills animals.
The worship of Artemis
originated in Ephesus
in Asia Minor, so
modern day Turkey,
where her temple was celebrated
throughout the ancient world.
This cult was then
later brought to Greece,
where the conception of this
deity was then reconceived.
So for Hegel, it is makes sense,
according to the narrative
he wants to tell, that this
Asian Artemis, if you will,
is portrayed in this way that
she's associated with nature.
She's wearing animal skins.
She's continuous with nature.
She has multiple breasts,
which look a little bit odd,
but the symbolism
is clear, right?
She's the nourishing
natural goddess
who is looking out for
all of the animals.
you see the different
animal heads below
that she's presumably
protecting.
Now we contrast that to the
Greek Artemis down there.
We're in a completely
different world, right?
The Greek Artemis is, again,
completely anthropomorphic,
looks just like a human
being, looks like a woman.
And here instead of a nurturing
nature, what's Artemis?
She's the hunter, right?
She is dominating nature.
She's getting ready to kill this
deer that she's just caught.
She's superior to nature.
The natural has lost
the sacred status here.
Another example that Hegel
uses to illustrate his point
has to do with a comparison
and contrast between Egypt
and the Greeks.
Take the pyramids.
What are the pyramids?
Of course, we all know they
play an important religious
functions.
The pyramids were the great
funeral monuments to pharaohs.
They're intended to facilitate
the journey of the pharaoh's
spirit to the world of the dead.
The deceased pharaoh,
however, is not
something who's accessible
to religious believers,
but rather he's
cut off from them.
They have a series of
different sarcophagi
in the pyramid itself.
For Hegel, this represents a
form of religious alienation.
Let me explain what he means
by that just by comparison
with Greek architecture.
When one thinks about the
Parthenon and other public
temples or sanctuaries on
the Acropolis at Athens,
they are open and accessible,
inviting the citizen
to come and enter.
They're elaborately
decorated precisely in order
to be viewed from the outside.
These structures are
located in prominent places
where the citizens
came together and met
to attend to public business.
They in a certain sense beckoned
the visitor to approach.
So the building of the Parthenon
played an important role here,
primarily to showcase the great
sculpture of the patron deity
Athena, which is made accessible
to the Greeks on festival days.
Also the image is
shown on Greek coins.
So for Hegel, what the
Greek mind is all about here
is transparency.
It's simply showing
immediately the divine
without anything
hidden or mysterious.
These great monuments are
intended to show things
and not to hide things.
He thinks, think of this in
contrast to the Egyptians.
After the completion
of the pyramids,
the entrances are sealed
and hidden from view.
We tend to forget this, right?
We're used to seeing all
these great shows about Egypt
on Discovery Channel
or something,
where they take you
inside the pyramid.
you weren't supposed to
ever see that stuff, right?
The thing was closed off.
The only thing that the average
religious believer or whatever,
the devotee, could see
was from the outside.
And there on the
outside of the pyramids,
there's nothing striking
or ornamental about it
apart from the massive size.
By contrast, the Parthenon
is elaborately decorated
with these detailed
friezes depicting
scenes of Greek mythology.
The visitors enjoined
to stop to contemplate
those depictions at length.
So indeed one needs to
come up close in order
to see them properly.
And so the idea for Hegel
is that the monuments
for the Egyptians are intended
not to reveal or to clarify,
to explain something, but
rather to hide something within.
It's all about a
mystery or an enigma
that you're left to sort
of puzzle about afterwards,
whereas for the Greek
mind, according to Hegel,
has sort of reached this point
of realization of what spirit
is and that's why
it's able to make
this transparent to people.
There's nothing that's
mysterious about it.
There's a somewhat
odd result that
comes from this analysis, which
I suggested at the beginning.
Although Hegel's
stated goal here
is to demonstrate that
the truth of Christianity,
in fact, his methodology
demonstrates something that's
quite different, namely
that the different religions
of the world all have
certain common features
in the course of
their development.
The Greek religion runs through
the same developmental pattern
as the religions of nature.
And moreover, there
are still vestiges
of the religions of nature,
even in Christianity.
So this means that there's
no one religion which
has a monopoly on truth.
Instead, religion is
a fundamental aspect
of the human
experience, and truth
can be found in all
religious traditions.
In this sense, Hegel can
be said to anticipate
the modern movement.
We know it today as
comparative theology,
which attempts to compare
various doctrines and dogmas
across different
religions in order
to determine their
commonalities or differences.
This movement thus
believes, for example,
that Christian truths can be
found in Buddhist or Hindu
texts, and vice versa.
Some might say that
this is reading
Hegel against his own
goals and intentions,
and I'm open to this criticism.
I can acknowledge that
to a certain degree,
but I don't feel like
I'm doing violence
to the text with this
reading because I think
this is-- if you
read the text, you
see what he's doing
methodologically.
This is what he's seeing.
Although, to be sure, there's
a lot in Hegel's lectures
that we should
reject, even condemn,
but I also think
there's a lot that's
intriguing and
insightful, especially
in our modern
globalized world, which
is so fraught with religious
prejudice, misunderstanding,
and conflict.
I think he's still got a
valuable message for us.
Religious belief and
practice are a universal part
of the human experience
that we can't escape.
This is an experience
that we all share,
regardless of what denomination
we personally belong to.
And so Hegel's plea
is that it's not
that is often thought we should
simply stand back and celebrate
Christianity as the
truest and best religion
to the exclusion
of everything else.
Instead, I think his view, which
maintains its relevance for us
today, is rather that
this quotation here,
in every religion there
is a divine presence,
a divine relation,
and philosophy
has to seek out the
spiritual element in the most
different forms.
And so his idea is, he
often uses the metaphor
of a plant, right, the
plant being humanity, which
is growing in different ways.
And so Although you can
look at different aspects
of the plants, the seed, or the
stalk or the leaf or whatever
and they look very,
very different
the way religions
look very different.
Instead, they're a part of
the same organic growth,
the same way humanity
is an organic growth.
And I think those are the kind
of images that are useful,
so the point is that
for Hegel, there's
a truth in all religions.
And if we can take a right
philosophical approach,
then we can learn
to recognize them.
And I think this is
a valuable lesson
that he can share with us today
in our modern globalized world.
So I thank you for your
attention and interest.
[APPLAUSE]
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