2025-04-02

I've actually started my journey with Hegel today. I picked Stephen Houlgate's An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History as my doorway to Hegel and with this screenshot, I am surprised to find Dietrich Bonhoeffer actually being associated with him.

In hindsight, it actually makes sense how he talks about the costs of discipleship. What I recognize something Hegelian about it is (and still, with my limited and possibly, misinformed understanding of Hegel) the dialectic relationship of Christian faith in relationship to one's self, particularly, by defining the "negative" aspect of discipleship as living the life prescribed by Jesus in The New Testament, which is full of negation of the self. In the same way, it is very much likely that I view spiritual growth in the same manner, where it is a dialectical relationship between the immovable spirit larger than the self, and the ever-dynamic ebbs and flows of the fluidity of human personality.

What I get from this revelation is that I am actually in the right track. Houlgate's introduction actually proceeds naming Derrida as one of the philosophers who had sprung due to Hegel's philosophy. Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism is a response against Hegel (as what I was told, at least), and both are philosophers who have been a constant in forming my own personal beliefs. It feels good to actually feel like I am tracing the roots of my own ways of thinking. This only confirms that I am headed the right way as more familiar faces come up from time to time.