Byung-Chul Han on Hegel: Zen Buddhism and Christianity 

Sorry for the last minute upload! Week 9 at my college (professor) + uni (student), plus I hosted a philosophy discussion at my campus on Monday and have to prepare for a podcast tomorrow, on this subject. I have a lot of work to do as I only got through the first 5 pages in this lecture, but super interesting, I think, so far. It really inspires me to read more Hegel! Let me know what you think, esp. if you have familiarity with either Hegel's writings on religion or with Zen Buddhism. I have class at 2 today, so I will be prepping for my Native American mythology lectures while you all enjoy this! Thanks!

Thank you. heart BCH

I am currently writing a critique of BCH so you've given me some new info to look into. I actually think BCH work borders on theological writing, especially the way he talks about "the Other." He's a very dogmatic philosopher.

Zen and phenomenology, that´s an interesting topic. Indeed, I did some study on it. However, Han Byung-Chul has not been on my reading-list, yet; maybe, I´ll now give it a try, although my impression is that his comparitive study doesn´t really reach into the depth of the matter - but sure, that would be a huge task, beyond the scope of a single book. Hearing Your introduction, three questions/problems came spontaneously to my mind: 1) I wonder what vaild informations Hegel could have had on Buddhism - namely, since Zen/Chân was not introduced to German speakers until about 100 years ago. The first prominent "Buddhaist" (sic!) seems to have been A. Schopenhauer, who yet, in reality, got his "orientalist impressions" from a translation of an Arabic (or Persian[?]) translation of the Upanishads. 2) Christianity and Zen-Buddhism developed many different "layers of paradigms", so to speak (following H. Küng´s model, inspired by T. Kuhn). Therefore, G.W.F. Hegel felt relatively free (well, there was some "köngliche Zensur"/royal censorsphip at schools and universities) to develop his own "system" - and, although I´m not an expert on Hegel, it should present itself as quite a complicated one, when one would decide to take a closer look, resp. to go into greater details. 3) Recently, I listened to some introductions into the "Phänomenologie des Geistes" on RU-vid and found some aspects quite interesting and "very phenomenologically, indeed" (seen up against what I had heared before: that Hegelian "Phänomenologie" had nothing to do with the Husserlian one; now I got the hunch that there exists some common ground...). My impression now is: Although Hegel seems, later, to have regarded his PdG as at best a kind of "prolegomenon" - his "meditations" on the "mechanics of thinking" (to borrow from the title of a book by W. Rathenau) can be interpreted as "psychonautical" explorations similar to the ones of the phenomenological movement, as founded by Edmund Husserl, - and the modern "philosophical arm" of Zen-Buddhism, that is, namely the so called Kyôto-school. There really seems to lie a big potential for further investigations in this topic .