Spirit

The Enlightenment

Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and support fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his corruption.

Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment represents the third part of his analysis of pure insight. In the previous section, insight was looked at in itself—as a self-reflection without content—and in its relation actuality—as the drive to conceptualisation. This third step, which regards insight in its relationship (its ‘struggle’) with faith, emerges out of the last section’s final realisation: that insight has a will to universality, to establish a unified conceptualisation of the entire world under the rational eye of the self.

Since pure insight is a process, the Enlightenment is a journey: the ‘dissemination’ of insight, as we are told at the opening of the chapter on Spirit.¹ As with all journeys in the Phenomenology, when the subject has traversed their intended path of action they will find themselves transformed on the basis of this traversal: Enlightenment’s attitude towards faith is a kind of paternalistic ethic, and just as the book’s previous paternalist (the law of the heart) realised about itself, Enlightenment is unwittingly entangled in that which it intends to criticise.

Where Culture was captured in the disorganised back-and-forth between Rameau’s newphew and the philosophe, Enlightenment emerges—as all signs of development do in Hegel—as a third term. But where in Diderot’s book does a third term appear? The dialogue, from beginning to end, is between only two characters. And yet all of this ‘claptrap’ will have been forgotten, Hegel points out, if it were not gathered up into a whole by a ‘third consciousness’; in other words, if the speech (the ‘scattered language’) of the dialogue had not been collected in the universality of writing; in other words again, if Diderot had not written it.² Over and above young Rameau and his friend, it is Diderot himself who is enlightened insofar as he is able to mediate the conversation he records and thereby render a general insight from it. It is presuambly for the same reasons that we attribute the ideas in the Republic to Plato and not to Socrates nor Glaucon.

[Insert commentary on §539-40.]

The journey of the Enlightenment is a ‘struggle’ because its protagonist conducts itself negatively.³ Enlightened consciousness casts itself against the world, at least insofar as it takes the world to be caught up in illusions and deceptions. In its negativity, it is in the same party as skepticism and self-actualising reason, but it is distinguished from these former shapes of consciousness insofar as it emerges from and relates to substance, not just self-consciousness; the Enlightenment was always a social movement, not just a mental exercise of self-assertion. In the Meditations, Descartes—a practitioner of pure insight if there ever was one—made the move from thought to substance, both in his proof of external objects and his move from cogito to res cogitans. In Enlightenment, insight makes the same move, recognising that its ideal must become (socially) substantial if it is to retain any stability and meaning—a lesson we learned at the eclipse of the chapter on Reason—and that it can do this only if it is universalised.

But Descartes (and Francis Bacon too) sought to reconcile scientific knowledge of substances with religious belief. The Cartesian proof of materiality goes hand in hand with his proof of the existence of God. It is therefore in these seventeenth-century thinkers that we see stark evidence of faith and insight’s parity as the two facades of pure consciousness. The Enlightenment, which (at least for Hegel) emerges from the turn of pure insight against faith, must therefore begin later, with eighteenth-century, mostly French writers writers like Diderot and d’Holbach. Consider that Descartes is a dualist, apportioning room for both faith and science, whereas Diderot is a proponent of monist naturalism. This non-dualism applies even to the theists of Enlightenment, like Pierre Bayle: for these radically enlightened writers, even as a believer one must concede that there is a single basis for all genuine thought—reason—and that this basis holds everywhere, for everyone.⁴ In this idea we can see already Hegel’s critical point: that the Enlightenment manifests its own kind of faith, and is not so distinct from its antagonist (as the master is not so distinct from his slave): both positions believe that thought must be subjected to an external criterion which is its own source of legitimation and which subjects every individual equally.

Although enlightened insight does not recognise itself as a form of faith from the start, it does recognise faith as a form of false insight: the faithful claim to understand the world and their place in it, but they do so in a manner that is immediate, naïve, and devoid of self-reflection. Faith is a ‘tissue’—there is medical imagery here which Hegel will return to—of ‘superstitions, prejudices, and errors.’⁵ Indeed, Enlightenment formulates a whole map of the social world that is caught up in faith: first there is the faith itself, manifested in ‘the duped masses’;⁶ secondly, the ‘priesthood’ who employ their deformed insight, based in self-interest and not self-reflection, for the sake of deceiving the masses; thirdly, ‘despotism’: a ‘conceptless unity of the real and the ideal realm’, a totally ideological structure which feeds off of the masses and the priesthood that dupes them. We have already seen, in the first conflicts between faith and pure insight, the critique of belief-as-projection that Enlightenment philosophers levelled against Christianity. The critique of religion as a vehicle of despotism was Enlightenment’s second critique. While the projection-critique asked, ‘what can I know?’, the deception-critique asks: ‘what does this knowledge serve?’ Already in Enlightenment, therefore, we see an early seed of the twentieth century’s ideology critique.⁷