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Authors: Stephen Backhouse
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was a sharp critic and a keen satirist, who, to Søren’s delight, could easily puncture the pomposity of Copenhagen’s intellectual elite.
The prime source of puffed-up cultural superiority in nineteenth-century Europe was the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. One of Hegel’s Big Ideas was that the historical development of art, religion, and philosophy told us something true about the development of the Divine Mind in the universe. The revelation of God was not to be found in a person or a holy text but in the development of a culture’s history. The unfolding Spirit is first encountered in a society’s art. This artistic expression is then given meaning and explanation in that society’s religion. Finally, it is philosophy that explains the religion. The Spirit is ever developing and thus the Divine is revealed in mankind’s highest achievements. To see the latest and best manifestation of the Divine Mind in the world, all one has to do is look at the latest and best manifestation of the world’s civilisation. The reader will be given no prizes for guessing whose art, religion, and philosophy the Western European Hegel thought was currently sitting on the top of the civilizational pile.
Hegel was (and is) a towering figure in Western philosophy. His influence was (and is) immense, even where his name goes unacknowledged. Hegel and his followers have a hand in such apparently opposite movements as the Manifest Destiny of American exceptionalism, the class-war struggle of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and the triumphalism of the Third Reich. Both the liberal myth of progress and the conservative myth of the Golden Age owe Hegel a debt of gratitude. Wherever one finds a commitment to one’s culture and history as itself being a vehicle for truth, one finds Hegel’s fingerprints.
If you were an academic or literary figure in Denmark in the 1830s, Hegel was inescapable. Either you were setting yourself against him and his systematic view of culture or you were seeking to align your favoured theories with his. Either way, you were grappling with the knotty Swabian. As with the rest of Europe, much of the Danish scene at this time saw authors, philosophers, theologians, and churchmen finding ways to articulate their innate sense of cultural superiority along Hegelian lines.
Sibbern and Møller were no different. Sibbern had to account for Hegelian dialectic in his own aesthetic philosophy. He questioned the Hegelian presumption that one could approach a subject without presuppositions and attain some sort of neutral, objective point of view. By 1837 Møller was offering a sympathetic critique of Hegelianism, based in part on Hegel’s inability to account for individual experiences. What marks Sibbern and Møller apart from many of their contemporaries at the university is a healthy scepticism about the pretensions of many of Hegel’s Danish followers. It is from them that Søren must have begun to form his own approach to Hegel: a respectful yet critical reading of the master coupled with fierce and unrelenting attacks on the affections of his self-styled disciples. Hegel yes, but especially the Danish Hegelians would be a primary target for the rest of Søren’s life.
The main disciple was Hans Lassen Martensen. Long before he became the bishop overlooking Søren’s funeral from afar, Martensen was a promising young theologian. In the 1830s he was gaining a reputation in church and university circles as an exciting communicator of complex ideas, especially Hegelianism, of which Martensen was an early champion. In his lectures and publications throughout this time Martensen developed his take on the typical Hegelian view that the established church, culture, and state are crucial to religion and part of Christianity’s inevitable progress. Martensen was also adept at teaching on subjects such as Cartesian philosophy and modern theology, and Søren engaged him as a personal tutor in the summer of
The prime source of puffed-up cultural superiority in nineteenth-century Europe was the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. One of Hegel’s Big Ideas was that the historical development of art, religion, and philosophy told us something true about the development of the Divine Mind in the universe. The revelation of God was not to be found in a person or a holy text but in the development of a culture’s history. The unfolding Spirit is first encountered in a society’s art. This artistic expression is then given meaning and explanation in that society’s religion. Finally, it is philosophy that explains the religion. The Spirit is ever developing and thus the Divine is revealed in mankind’s highest achievements. To see the latest and best manifestation of the Divine Mind in the world, all one has to do is look at the latest and best manifestation of the world’s civilisation. The reader will be given no prizes for guessing whose art, religion, and philosophy the Western European Hegel thought was currently sitting on the top of the civilizational pile.
Hegel was (and is) a towering figure in Western philosophy. His influence was (and is) immense, even where his name goes unacknowledged. Hegel and his followers have a hand in such apparently opposite movements as the Manifest Destiny of American exceptionalism, the class-war struggle of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and the triumphalism of the Third Reich. Both the liberal myth of progress and the conservative myth of the Golden Age owe Hegel a debt of gratitude. Wherever one finds a commitment to one’s culture and history as itself being a vehicle for truth, one finds Hegel’s fingerprints.
If you were an academic or literary figure in Denmark in the 1830s, Hegel was inescapable. Either you were setting yourself against him and his systematic view of culture or you were seeking to align your favoured theories with his. Either way, you were grappling with the knotty Swabian. As with the rest of Europe, much of the Danish scene at this time saw authors, philosophers, theologians, and churchmen finding ways to articulate their innate sense of cultural superiority along Hegelian lines.
Sibbern and Møller were no different. Sibbern had to account for Hegelian dialectic in his own aesthetic philosophy. He questioned the Hegelian presumption that one could approach a subject without presuppositions and attain some sort of neutral, objective point of view. By 1837 Møller was offering a sympathetic critique of Hegelianism, based in part on Hegel’s inability to account for individual experiences. What marks Sibbern and Møller apart from many of their contemporaries at the university is a healthy scepticism about the pretensions of many of Hegel’s Danish followers. It is from them that Søren must have begun to form his own approach to Hegel: a respectful yet critical reading of the master coupled with fierce and unrelenting attacks on the affections of his self-styled disciples. Hegel yes, but especially the Danish Hegelians would be a primary target for the rest of Søren’s life.
The main disciple was Hans Lassen Martensen. Long before he became the bishop overlooking Søren’s funeral from afar, Martensen was a promising young theologian. In the 1830s he was gaining a reputation in church and university circles as an exciting communicator of complex ideas, especially Hegelianism, of which Martensen was an early champion. In his lectures and publications throughout this time Martensen developed his take on the typical Hegelian view that the established church, culture, and state are crucial to religion and part of Christianity’s inevitable progress. Martensen was also adept at teaching on subjects such as Cartesian philosophy and modern theology, and Søren engaged him as a personal tutor in the summer of
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