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Hegel's Life and Times: Political and Philosophical Context
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Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
In this course, Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) explores Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The course begins with a discussion of Hegel's life and times and the political and philosophical context in which he lived, before introducing his overall philosophical vision or system. In the fourth and fifth modules, we turn to the Phenomenology itself, giving an account of its position in Hegel's philosophical system, and introducing its overall structure. In the modules that follow, the go through the Phenomenology section by section—from the Preface and the Introduction, through Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing. In the final module, we turn to the reception of the Phenomenology in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as some of the critical issues that relate to it.
Hegel's Life and Times: Political and Philosophical Context
Hegel is sometimes said to have lived an uneventful life in eventful times. In this module, we consider some of the influences on his philosophy, looking in particular at the political, cultural and philosophical context. On this last point, we spend some time discussing the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism had (according to Kant, at least) put metaphysics on the secure path of science. Kant's successors, however, including Hegel himself, had reasons to be doubtful.
My name is Robert Stern, Um Press at the University of Sheffield,
00:00:02and I'm here today to give you a short
00:00:07series of lectures on Hagel's phenomenology of spirit.
00:00:09Hagel is one of the pre eminent philosophers of the 19th century. From Germany.
00:00:12His dates were 17 72 18 31
00:00:18and he's a major figure within modern Western philosophy.
00:00:22It's often said that Hagel led an uneventful life in eventful times and
00:00:27in at least the times in which he lived were indeed eventful.
00:00:32And he has three sons, central
00:00:36influences in his background. So first of all,
00:00:39there's the political background to Hagel's ideas and in particular,
00:00:42the French Revolution of 17 89 which is obviously a major world historical event.
00:00:48And then the aftermath, including the terror
00:00:54and, uh, Napoleon's rise to power.
00:00:58In Germany itself, things were politically quieter in a way, but again touched by
00:01:02calls for reform and which were actually largely,
00:01:09uh, quashed in Germany itself.
00:01:14At the philosophical level,
00:01:17Hagel lived also an eventful times in the sense
00:01:19that he lived in the aftermath of Kant's revolutions,
00:01:23can't call it in philosophy,
00:01:27and Hagel was one of the generation of so called post canteen idealists,
00:01:28which include Victor
00:01:33and Shelling
00:01:34and I'll say more about can't in a little while.
00:01:36And then, thirdly,
00:01:39Hagel's part of a major cultural change in thinking in a sort of
00:01:41post enlightenment period where you get the
00:01:46rise of intellectual movements like Romanticism.
00:01:49Um, and again,
00:01:53Hagel was in many ways reacting to and caught up in some of these developments
00:01:54just to go back now to Kant's relation and influence on Hagel, as I said, can't, uh,
00:02:01recognise or presented his philosophy as a kind of revolution,
00:02:08and he called it the critical philosophy or also sometimes transcendental.
00:02:13Idealism was a central label for it,
00:02:19and the thought behind transcendental idealism was
00:02:22that somehow philosophy prior to the,
00:02:25uh,
00:02:28canteen period had gone fundamentally wrong and in particular
00:02:29was engaged in metaphysical inquiries that were fundamentally doomed
00:02:33and hopeless.
00:02:38And what we needed was a wholly new way of thinking about in particular,
00:02:40how the mind relates to the world.
00:02:44And this is what Kant called his Copernican revolution.
00:02:46So rather than thinking that the world is independent of
00:02:49the mind and the mind must somehow conformed to it,
00:02:54uh, he wanted to turn things the other way around so that in some to some extent,
00:02:57somehow the world must conform to our minds.
00:03:03However, he didn't claim that everything in the world is in our minds.
00:03:07That would be what he would have called material idealism,
00:03:12which he associated with idealists like Barkley.
00:03:15Uh, rather, he called it formal idealism.
00:03:17So it's more that the structure of the world, as we experience it,
00:03:20comes from our way of thinking, our way of understanding.
00:03:25But the content of what it is that we understand, which is shaped by that form
00:03:29is in some sense still independent of us
00:03:33now to Hagel's
00:03:38can't successes, this seemed to lead to various problems.
00:03:41First of all,
00:03:45it seemed to lead to a problem of potentially of scepticism
00:03:46because it seemed as this can't was saying the world outside.
00:03:50The way in which we think about it is still somehow there and called by.
00:03:54Sometimes we can't the thing in itself but were
00:03:59unable to access it or have knowledge of it,
00:04:02and that seemed of kind of scepticism.
00:04:04Secondly,
00:04:07the problem was that the way can't set things up the way he thought the mind worked
00:04:08uh seemed to set up various dual ISMs and
00:04:14in particular between the content of our experiences.
00:04:17So sensations and the understanding which formed those sensations.
00:04:22But also between what he called the understanding
00:04:27which relates to sensations in these ways and reason
00:04:31where on cancer count, reason precisely goes wrong because it
00:04:35drifts away from the content of our experience.
00:04:40And that seemed to make certain kinds of
00:04:43metaphysical knowledge impossible to us for can't,
00:04:45um
00:04:49And then the third worry was in particular in areas such as ethics.
00:04:50You get a kind of dualism again between inclination and duty,
00:04:56because inclination is tied in with the structure of the world as it appears to us.
00:05:02Um, whereas on the other hand, duty is, uh,
00:05:07formal again in a certain kind of way and set at
00:05:12odds with what we desire or what we want to do.
00:05:15So there's a kind of dualism going on, even in Kant's ethics
00:05:18at the same time, Can thought he could somehow incorporate within this story uh,
00:05:22some some conceptions of religion.
00:05:28Um, but again, the post counting idealists worried that that was again,
00:05:30in some way going to be unsuccessful.
00:05:35So Kant famously claimed to have saved philosophy and put
00:05:39metaphysics on what he called the secure path of science.
00:05:44But his successors were quick to raise doubts about these issues.
00:05:47And as I say in particular, there are two fundamental worries.
00:05:52The worry about scepticism because it seemed to leave too
00:05:55much room for human ignorance about things in themselves,
00:05:59uh,
00:06:02and about entities like God and Freedom and then
00:06:03dualism because we seem to have this opposition,
00:06:07for example, between appearances, how things appear to us and things themselves,
00:06:10understanding and reason, inclination and duty, and so on.
00:06:15
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Stern, R. (2018, August 15). Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel's Life and Times: Political and Philosophical Context [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/hegel-phenomenology-of-spirit/reception-and-critique
MLA style
Stern, R. "Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit – Hegel's Life and Times: Political and Philosophical Context." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/hegel-phenomenology-of-spirit/reception-and-critique