Borna Radnik: Freedom in Context II: Hegel, Time, and Freedom
September 12, 2026 — 10:00 AM Pacific Time
Reading:
Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom — Session II
This second session continues Borna Radnik’s examination of Christianity and the temporality of freedom in Hegel. Building on the previous session, the discussion turns more directly to the temporal structure of freedom and to the relation between historical necessity and self-determination. Through Hegel’s philosophy of religion, Christianity becomes a philosophical site for examining how freedom emerges from conditions that precede and determine it without remaining reducible to those conditions.
The session will explore Hegel’s account of divine history, the incarnation and death of Christ, the formation of the spiritual community, and the relation between finite human existence and the divine infinite. Central to the discussion is the distinction between chronological historical time and the retroactive temporality through which an emergent form can transform its relation to its own historical ground.
Particular attention will be given to Hegel’s concept of the true infinite and the movement of absolute recoil (absoluter Gegenstoß). Rather than understanding freedom as independence from historical and causal determination, the session considers how freedom can incorporate, internalize, and redirect the conditions through which it becomes possible. In this sense, Hegel’s account of Christianity provides a framework for thinking freedom not outside necessity, but through a transformation of the relation between necessity, history, and self-determination.
On Radnik's Freedom, in Context:
G.W.F. Hegel was a radical and incisive thinker, whose ideas have shaped the face of political philosophy. With questions of political agency and free will as urgent as ever, this book reintroduces Hegel's ideas of freedom and the weight that it carries in the political, economic and social contexts of the 21st century.
Examining the concept of freedom from a Hegelian Marxist perspective, Freedom, in Context argues that the essential relation between self-determination and causal necessity is a multifaceted process to be viewed through historical, temporal, logical and ontological lenses. Using examples from the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, economic inequality, and democratic uprisings in Iran, the value of Hegel's philosophy is emphasised in contexts beyond the colonial, Eurocentric tendencies of his worldview. Emphasising the central role of temporality and history in the conception of free will gives this new reading of Hegel real practical import for the pressing political issues of our time.
Additional Readings:
Previous event:
Borna Radnik: Can Logic Be Temporal? A Presentation on Hegel’s Logic and Time
February 23rd, 10 am Pacific Time
Scholars readily accept that Hegel’s philosophy has a historicity in the sense that philosophy itself for Hegel cannot be divorced from its historical context. But there is less consensus as to whether or not Hegel’s logic, with its pure and abstract categories, are subject to temporal change and historical circumstances. What is the relation between logical time, natural time, and historical time in Hegel’s thought? This presentation attempts to tackle the relation between time and logic in Hegel’s philosophy by arguing that temporality is an ontological feature of Hegel’s conception of logic and constitutes his idea of freedom developed in the Science of Logic as the absolute idea that unifies the self-determining concept and objectivity.
Borna Radnik has a Ph.D. from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Kingston University London, UK. He has published with Radical Philosophy, Continental Thought and Theory, and Crisis and Critique.
Comments