“Reading the morning paper is a kind of realistic morning prayer”

Hegel's best known treatment of the European Enlightenment (in his Phänomenologie des Geistes) singles out the problem of religious faith, or the new, modern struggle between insight and faith, between enlightenment and what its defenders saw as mere “superstition”.

This treatment is distinctive and on the face of it highly controversial. For one thing, while the topic is simply announced as die Aufklärung, Hegel makes no attempt at a comprehensive survey. Bacon, Swift, Smith and the British seem to play no discernable role; oddly, neither do Lessing or Mendelssohn or the German, “Berlin” Enlightenment. If there is a focus in these highly typological and categorial distinctions, it is clearly le siècle du lumière, not die Aufklärung or the Battle of the Books; if there is a representative figure, it is unquestionably Diderot; if there is a theme, it is ethical and broadly normative, not scientific or even political.

Hegel lived in a period in which many of his contemporaries reacted strongly against what they saw as the dangers or the excesses of the Enlightenment (the Aufklärung in Germany). One of the strongest reactions to this was Romanticism, a movement more or less born in Jena during the period Hegel was living there, carried out by some of his friends and by people he knew well, and something which both irritated him and which also quite clearly profoundly influenced him. This period in Jena was also the time during which Hegel was undergoing his rather rapid and astonishing philosophical development that culminated in what he always described as his “voyage of discovery,” the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In that book, Hegel carried out his own famous critique of the Enlightenment, which included his scathing charge that the “Enlightenment itself… is just as little enlightened about itself” and that it misunderstood the arguments of what he called “faith”. This could easily make Hegel seem to be a Romantic critic of the Enlightenment, somebody rejecting the apparent arrogance of all those French deists, Scottish skeptics, and materialists of all sorts in favor of some more emotionalist conception of human experience. Indeed, in a work often cited, this is exactly the conclusion that has been drawn (and it has appeared even in such popular publications as the English magazine, The Economist). On this view, Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment amounts to charging it with investing too much in reason and neglecting the emotional and religious side of experience, thus denying an essential part of human life. In short, that view sees Hegel's philosophy essentially as a species of the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment, bringing into play the familiar textbook oppositions of the mechanical versus the organic, disenchanted versus re-enchanted nature, and the like.

“Have the courage to use your own understanding!”. Thus Kant explicates the motto of enlightenment, sapere aude, inviting perhaps the readers of the Berlinische Monatschrift to follow suit. “[B]e for yourselves what you all are in yourselves – reasonable”. Thus Hegel introduces the pure insight of enlightened Spirit which addresses its emancipatory call to every consciousness. The apprised readers of the Phenomenology would know to temper their enthusiasm. Those who manage to get that far without doubting the clarity and simplicity of the Wahlspruch of enlightenment, are likely to be dissappointed by Hegel's subsequent analysis, which is largely intended to test such convictions. At the very least, the determined Aufklärer will have to consider whether the normative confidence of ‘dare to know’ is premised on unqualified theoretical certainty, and whether this instruction does not have an altogether more sombre half in the uncertainties of enlightened practice, let alone the terrifying certainty of the guillotine. In the following, I will argue that Kant modifies his initial definition of enlightenment by emphasising the collective and discursive dimensions of the enlightening process, the “freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters”. I will then argue that Hegel adopts a similar approach in the Phenomenology but evaluates differently the problems involved in establishing a public for reason and in assessing the rationality of this public and proposes a different model of public debate.

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924).

However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.

Readers of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie positive which began to appear just before Hegel's death might well have imagined, from the work's title, that they were about to confront an interpretation of Hegel's philosophical system. If Hegel himself had assembled his writings as systematically as his doctrines, that collective title would probably have embraced their meaning with greater accuracy than any other. The positivity of Comte's philosophy was of course strikingly different from Hegel's and was in a crucial sense meant to supplant it, replacing it with a genuinely scientific understanding of society, just as metaphysics had earlier overturned theology. Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, Comte's positive philosophy – which he also termed sociology – has in its various formulations by his disciples come to encapsulate the proper agenda of the human sciences for a post-metaphysical, post-Hegelian, age.