HEGEL
The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity’s Philosophical Issue
AS WE KNOW, KANT was not the only thinker who, at the end of the eighteenth century, posed questions on the nature of the Enlightenment in relation to universal history. A furious debate arose in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in which several famous authors took part.1 A deluge of pamphlets and articles was unleashed, confirming the urgency and relevance of the question of the historical self-awareness of the modern age as achieved specifically through an investigation of the nature of the Enlightenment. It is not by chance that the Jesuits, always quick to understand the political consequences implicit in intellectual confrontations, invented for the occasion the category of a katholische Aufklärung, a Catholic Enlightenment that was polemically opposed to the falsche Aufklärung, or “false Enlightenment,” of Kant’s supporters.2 And yet, however interesting, that debate soon faded and was forgotten, replaced by the far longer-lived and more controversial formulations on this topic put forward by Friedrich Hegel.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, between the Napoleonic period and the age of Restoration, it was Hegel who laid the foundations of what we have called the philosophers’ Enlightenment, which still largely dominates our discussions. He did so in the name of a concept of philosophy entirely different from that of Kant and other Enlightenment figures. He shifted the focus from the primacy of the subject, which was seen almost as though looking at itself in the mirror, to that of the spirit, the maker of reality. Hegel denied that man, in his autonomous finitude, could be at the center of theoretical interests. He placed the emphasis on the organic union of man and universe, within which eternal nature operates, rather than on an abstractly determined individual tending towards his own happiness. Whereas Kant had attempted to create a philosophy of reflection seen mainly as the “science of man,” Hegel—true to his Lutheran education—saw philosophy instead in terms of the phenomenology of the spirit, i.e., as a new and original science that brought back to life the Creator Spiritus from the Johannine Christian tradition and the Trinitarian view of God, thus capturing knowledge in its becoming through the various stages of the spirit’s dialectical self-realization in history. The common interest in the authentic meaning of the onset of the modern era in universal history, a topic that had fascinated the eighteenth century, became a crucial point in Hegel’s philosophy. It was the philosophical issue par excellence, and it linked together, indissolubly, modernity’s self-understanding and the Enlightenment’s self-determination, understood in its profound nature as dialectical movement.3
Hegel did not in the least share the Aufklärer’s disregard for the problems and costs of the modern, for the catastrophic discontinuities and fractures wrought by the new era in breaking with the past and its traditions. How could one, by a simple act of will, judge the past, erase it, and place the subject at center stage? Viewing the modern era as nothing other than a positive move in the inevitable course of progress seemed to him dangerous, and above all unilateral. He could not subscribe to the idea of a present that was totally open towards the future and indifferent to the terrible crises brought about by a rift with the past (which, among other things, gave rise to the very need for philosophy) or to a present indifferent to the spirit’s estrangement and to its unhappy consciousness, both processes caused by the determination of the principle of subjectivity in its historical happening.
The French Revolution and the slaughters produced by the Napoleonic wars certainly left little room for an entirely serene view of reality and of the destiny of mankind. The life of the spirit, in all its aspects, could not be contained wholly within the principle of subjectivity that had forged the character of modernity. That much was obvious. From Descartes’s cogito ergo sum to Kant’s absolute self-consciousness, this principle had expressed itself in a variety of forms: individualism, an “atomistic subjectivity,” a progressive disenchantment and objectivization of nature brought about by the scientific revolution, the free exercise of one’s right to criticize as prelude to political action, and a new self-consciousness of becoming. In fact, Hegel knew perfectly well that the positive perception of progress ingrained in the modern era was increasingly accompanied by a general sense of crisis, and by a profound existential unease in those who witnessed with dismay how the demise of the Ancien Régime went hand in hand with the demolition of centuries-old customs and traditions. In opposition to Kant’s philosophy, a philosophy founded on the reflection of the subject on itself and on the autonomy of reason with respect to reality, with all the attendant consequences in terms of breaks with the past and forms of estrangement in the present, Hegel propounded his own philosophy of unification and “conciliation.” The latter is a key word in Hegel’s science of the phenomenology of spirit, which is founded on two premises: the concept of the Absolute Spirit and that of “consciousness [that] has stepped out of the totality, that is, […] the split into being and not-being, concept and being, finitude and infinity.” The task of philosophy became then to unite these two premises, striving towards conciliation, which is seen not as an art of the mind, but rather as the mind reproducing the spirit’s essence in its happening. That is to say, “to posit being in non-being, as becoming; to posit dichotomy in the Absolute, as its appearance; to posit the finite in the infinite, as life.”4
Within this framework, dominated as it is by an entirely immanent standpoint and by a view of reason as the unity of the I and reality, the self-understanding of the real meaning of the Enlightenment within the phenomenology of spirit manifested itself as critique and dialectic of the Enlightenment itself; that is to say, in the precise identification of the Enlightenment as a stage and logical “moment” in the life of the spirit and, at the same time, as a decisive era in universal history. Hegel’s phenomenology aimed at exposing knowledge in its becoming, at illustrating the various stages of the spirit’s unfolding by examining moments, figures, degrees, and stages in the tormented dialectical course through which the spirit attained the status of pure knowledge, i.e., of Absolute Spirit “that knows itself as spirit.” Furthermore, this new science of knowledge examined on each occasion one of the various forms assumed by the spirit (i.e., its ethical, cultural, moral, or religious form), as it enacted the mechanisms of consciousness, self-consciousness, and of both observing reason and acting reason. Thus, the Enlightenment broke onto the historical scene as a particular crisis phase, as the world of self-estranged spirit, a dramatic final phase in the progressive domination of culture viewed as the estrangement of the natural being.
Within the dialectical movement that saw the spirit’s implacable and constant three-stage progression from in-itself to for-itself and in-and-for-itself, the Enlightenment embodied the logical figure of pure Insight (the absolute self), i.e., the final degree of the principle of subjectivity: abstract reason empty of all content, whose final development consists in becoming itself its own content. Highlighting a decisive point in his exposition, Hegel stresses how the Enlightenment “completes the alienation of Spirit in this realm, too, in which that Spirit takes refuge and where it is conscious of an unruffled peace.” The Enlightenment achieves this by waging war against its opposite, the counterpart of “pure insight,” i.e., “Faith as the alien realm of essence lying in the beyond.” It persists in that war to the point of upsetting “the housekeeping of Spirit in the household of Faith by bringing into that household the tools and utensils of this world, a world which that Spirit cannot deny is its own, because its consciousness likewise belongs to it.”5
The Enlightenment undertook a fierce and dramatic struggle against religious Faith, a fanatical “extirpation of error” carried out through the unmasking of superstitions and miracles, setting itself in opposition to popular beliefs, the clergy, and any kind of Revelation founded on tradition.6 And in order to win that struggle its proponents did not hesitate to lie and to undervalue Faith’s very reasons, since they believed it to be nothing more than a form of “error and prejudice” (333). The irreducible opposition between human law and divine law thus became one of many examples of the rifts and of the general crisis brought about by an implacable no-holds-barred “struggle,” (ibid.) fought between two unilateral moments in the spirit’s consciousness; i.e., Faith and the Enlightenment, each unable to become reconciled with the other. One need only say that pure Insight, that is to say the protagonism of the self-estranged subject, within the perspective of the “purposiveness” of reflexive reason (338–39), did not hesitate to reduce religion to an entirely earthly and universal category: it was a category that it had itself invented—that of Faith as “supremely useful” (343), nothing more than an object or commodity. Consequently, however, the same destiny awaited man, who went from being the world’s great master and exploiter to being used himself. Hegel describes in some particularly evocative pages the final victory of the Enlightenment, whereby “heaven is transplanted to earth below” (355). However, precisely because of the logics inherent in the dialectic of a restless spirit that can never pause in its unstoppable race towards absolute knowledge, that state of things was liable to experience a rapid dialectical reversal as new moments and figures manifested, that were destined to expose the dark side of the principle of subjectivity and the conflicts caused by its ephemeral triumph.
Once victory has been achieved, with the attendant pollution of “its spiritual consciousness with mean thoughts of sensuous reality” (348), according to Hegel the “Enlightenment is caught up in the same internal conflict that it formerly experienced in connection with faith, and it divides itself into two parties” (350):7 on one side are those who adhere to atheist materialism, on the other are the supporters of deism and of a civic and natural religion without any Churches, who are determined to own and use themselves that principle of faith to which they had previously been fiercely opposed. However, outside, in the background to that struggle, the spirit’s estrangement persisted as an unresolved problem arising from the “blemish of an unsatisfied yearning” of the Enlightenment itself “as action and movement, in going beyond its individual self” (349). Hegel pointed out that the universal aspect that was common to both “parties” of the Enlightenment was “the pure Notion as implicitly existent, or pure thought within itself.” Both parties had in fact “arrived at the Notion found in Descartes’s metaphysics, that being and thought are, in themselves, the same […] that thought is thinghood, or thinghood is thought” (352).
This is why Insight was determined to transform pure thought into pure thing, and to objectify itself into the world of the Useful. It also explains why a “new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom” (356) appears on the scene: a new form that, after Faith’s defeat, “ascends the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it” (357). “Spirit thus comes before us as absolute freedom. It is self-consciousness which grasps the fact that its certainty of itself is the essence of all the spiritual “masses,” or spheres, of the real as well as of the supersensible world” (356). No wonder that its action, being totally unchecked and incapable of distinguishing between reality and thought, ends up programmatically producing “death” and “terror” (362) in its unstoppable and necessary determination, before coming to rest in a new phase of conciliation.
One might continue to follow in every detail the obscure and at times un-decipherable course of the phenomenology of spirit in its complex logical and dialectical definition of the Enlightenment as a major philosophical issue. We might trace its contradictions, rifts and temporary conciliations, and experience that anguished sense of profound crisis caused by the spirit’s resolution into the reality of the modern era, that emerges here and there in Hegel’s words. However, we would then risk losing sight of the real objective of our discussion, which is to throw light on the genesis of the “Centaur” as a powerful and still-active paradigm and, at the same time, on the strength and persistence of the European anti-Enlightenment tradition, starting precisely from the latest developments of the critique and dialectic of the Enlightenment as described in the 1807 Phenomenology.
To that end, it may be more useful to turn to another work by Hegel, the famous Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (The Philosophy of History), published posthumously in 1837. In that text the German philosopher outlined with far greater clarity and effectiveness his complex representation of the Enlightenment from a historical and philosophical point of view, as the enthronement of thought, i.e., as the final and decisive stage of the modern era’s unhappy self-estranged spirit. Here the principle of subjectivity that had been the basis of Kant’s philosophy of reflection took it upon itself to shape reality, ruthlessly excluding all recourse to the authority principle, or to the example of the past and the force of tradition, and ended up by paying for it with the Revolution and the Reign of Terror. This was different from the result produced by the Lutheran Reformation, which had brought about “Modern Times” through its role as “the period of Spirit conscious that it is free, inasmuch as it wills the True, the Eternal—that which is in and for itself Universal.”8 That was a time when the discovery of individual consciousness and of the spiritual freedom of the self had harmonized with the message of Revelation in a claim for universal priesthood, thus concretely reconciling God and man, finite and infinite. By contrast, the Enlightenment had sought every answer, every content, exclusively within nature and man himself. This had produced fractures and dramatic lacerations, which became comprehensible only if one understood the fundamental dialectical relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which was the third decisive historical moment of the modern era. “Thought is the grade to which Spirit has now advanced” (439), Hegel wrote, and further pointed out:
These general conceptions, deduced from actual and present consciousness—the Laws of Nature and the substance of what is right and good—have received the name of Reason. The recognition of the validity of these laws was designated by the term […] Aufklärung [….] The absolute criterion—taking the place of all authority based on religious belief and positive laws of Right (especially political Right)—is the verdict passed by Spirit itself on the character of that which is to be believed and obeyed. (441)
In describing the Enlightenment’s historical expression in the course of the eighteenth century, Hegel assigned extraordinary importance to the reforms introduced by individuals of cosmic-universal stature, such as Frederick II, and to the effects of the political theories of Rousseau and of the French philosophes. He also took into account the profound transformations wrought by the exercise of the principle of subjectivity and by the philosophy of reflection hinging upon the primacy of the subject that had been brought to its highest level by Kant. These transformations were analyzed in relation to their effects in redefining politics, morals, religion, and every form of knowledge. The historical world produced by the Enlightenment seemed to him to be completely different from the Ancien Régime—a definitive break with the past. The idea of a thinking State is due to the “jusnaturalism” of the Enlightenment:
Right and Morality came to be looked upon as having their foundation in the actual present Will of man, whereas formerly it was referred only to the command of God enjoined ab extra, written in the Old and New Testament, or appearing in the form of particular Right in old parchments, as privilegia, or in international compacts. What the nations acknowledge as international Right was deduced empirically from observation (as in the work of Grotius); then the source of the existing civil and political law was looked for, after Cicero’s fashion, in those instincts of men which Nature has planted in their hearts. (440–441)
With the Enlightenment, the subject’s boundless freedom, which was the authentic founding principle of modernity, had reached its apex and had presented itself as being absolute. The will had become pure, omnipotent, “in and for itself.” From Rousseau, for whom man is will and is free only insofar as he wishes what corresponds to his will, one had thus reached Kant’s philosophy, whose analysis of practical reason reiterated once again that every content, whether in respect of liberty or will, lay within man himself. Hegel, as he wrote in every one of his works, never harbored the least doubt that the French Revolution had its genesis and its beginning in thought, i.e., in philosophy as “World Wisdom,” or “Truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world” (446). For Hegel it was the complex meandering of this dialectic that held the secret of that momentous universal event that had changed the history of the world forever.
Unlike Kant, who saw in the French Revolution above all a “historical sign” of mankind’s moral disposition to progress, Hegel considered it proof of the unilaterality and dangerousness of the self-estranged spirit as it acted through the subject’s absolute freedom. To begin with, this freedom had been met with more or less general approval and optimistic expectations, including his own. The rise to power by a fully autonomous human thought was bound to be greeted with emotion and excitement by a world that had no inkling of the consequences that it would bring to bear. Hegel described this “first” in universal history as follows:
Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e. in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. Anaxagoras had been the first to say that Nous governs the World; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that Thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the Divine and the Secular was now first accomplished. (447)
However, no conciliation was imminent—quite the opposite, in fact. Subsequent tragic events made it clear that the thoughts produced by the culture of the Enlightenment, in their abstract quality and claim to truth, were destined to become increasingly fantastical and polemical towards all that exists. By an inexorable kind of revolution mechanics, which was implicit in the dialectical movement of historical processes, the subject’s absolute freedom and boundless will, together with the rejection of traditions and religion, had turned into an ostentation of virtue, thus opening the door to suspicion and fear, followed by terror and bloodshed.
As a matter of fact, with these lectures that he read at the University of Berlin, in which he described how the Enlightenment’s dialectical movement through history ultimately resulted in the tragedy of the Reign of Terror, Hegel more or less consciously added his own contribution to the already formidable arsenal of anti-Enlightenment arguments, according to a tradition still in operation today that was developing precisely in the years following the Congress of Vienna, thanks to the polemics raised by the followers of Romanticism.9 In fact, this was nothing new. Hegel had done it before, when he had criticized the inadequacy of the knowledge value of modern science, and of Newtonian science in particular, for the purposes of the search for truth, and also when he had opposed cosmopolitism, the rights of man, the individual’s atomization in the kind of civic society envisaged by the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of reflection.10
However, with his analysis of the dialectical processes behind the Reign of Terror, Hegel had gone further. He had divested Kant’s subjective reason of its claims of emancipation, and revealed the existence within it of a precise and disturbing tendency towards domination, an inclination towards the distortion of reality and the subjugation of the individual. The same reasons that explained why the Revolution had happened in France rather than in the German States, confirmed for him the correctness of his view of philosophy as phenomenology of spirit and as drive towards conciliation.
In Germany, after Luther and the Reformation, there had been no revolutionary movements on a national scale, because the German world had already long before achieved its conciliation with reality through a “real” revolution: that is to say a revolution of a religious nature, rather than a social or political one. This had finally recreated in its consciousness that unity of finite and infinite, of religion and politics, that had characterized Christianity in its original state. And this for Hegel was not simply the only authentic universal religion (in whose concept of Christ, the God-made-man, the world had found peace and conciliation), but also a fundamental historical model for a unified spirit and an ethical state in which a community lived by its own free choice. Conversely, in the Catholic world, the crystallized Church-State dualism had led to the persistence of two powers and therefore two kinds of consciousness, one opposed to the other. This had undermined the social organism of peoples from the inside, which ultimately resulted in a conflict between Faith and pure Insight, thus setting up the conditions for a profound crisis that would be passed on to nineteenth-century Europe.
It was through Hegel that the Enlightenment became a fundamental universal category in the intellectual life of the Western world, permanently and indissolubly associated with the debate on modernity’s critical self-understanding. However, as we have tried to demonstrate, this took place within an entirely original conceptualization and understanding of events, a view that was at one and the same time historical and philosophical in character: i.e., that strange and captivating paradigm of the Centaur that everyone was ultimately forced to reckon with, whether they were aware of it or not.
In his Philosophy of History, Hegel again aired this original view of history through his polemics against the methods of investigation applied by the powerful corporation of professional historians, which at this precise time was becoming an institution within German universities. Hegel’s critique was directed against those who harbored the illusion that one could attain truth by simply adhering faithfully to philology and to the imagined objectivity of historical data, while feigning ignorance of the fact that one’s thought is never “passive.” A historiographer always “brings his categories with him and sees all of the phenomena presented to his mental vision exclusively through these media.”11 In contrast to the “original history” of Herodotus and Thucydides, which was founded on witness accounts, and to the Enlightenment’s universal “reflective history,” born of the spirit’s critique and inquiry into the past, Hegel proposed a new kind of history, a “philosophical history” (1). This was a genre different from either Augustine’s traditional “theology of history” or Voltaire’s “philosophy of history.” It saw history as modern theodicy; that is to say as a discipline capable of translating theology into philosophy, of showing the spirit’s progress within the consciousness of liberty. Behind the study of the history of peoples there was then the conviction that everything “that has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work” (457).
Within this evocative framework, the Enlightenment appeared radically altered from Kant’s earlier conception. According to the latter, which referred to a philosophical kind of history but one played out entirely within a cosmopolitan perspective, the Enlightenment was defined first and foremost as a specific modality of the exercise of reason on the part of man in the course of “enlightened” centuries in the past and, presumably, in the future. With Hegel it became nothing more than a specific era in universal history, essentially coinciding with the eighteenth century as it unfolded in Europe. It was an era characterized by specific and clear-cut features, and, in any case, an era now definitively consigned to the past by the action of one of the World Spirit’s most important historical and logical laws, that of annulment or “sublation,” whereby the spirit progressed inexorably in its becoming, moving from lower determinations to higher principles and concepts of itself, and ever-more evolved representations of its idea.
Thus the age after the Congress of Vienna that was marked by the rise of liberalism, by Romanticism, and by attempts to restore the Old Order had moved irremediably beyond the age of Voltaire. This meant that it was now the historians’ task, as well as problem, to investigate and thoroughly understand the characteristics of that era, which had proved so decisive for universal history, starting with the self-evident connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, and between the growing passion for reform and its ultimate conclusion in terror. However, a far more complex question remained, and one more difficult to settle. How should the major philosophical issue of the Enlightenment be resolved; namely, the dilemma of man, who, starting from the finitude and autonomy of the subject, questions his destiny and the meaning of life?
Hegel formulated this issue in the clear terms of the “dialectical moment,” linking it to the theme of the self-foundation and sublation of the crisis opened by modernity—a formulation that was based on the phenomenology of spirit and its concept of the sublation of subjectivity within the limits of the philosophy of the subject. Hegel’s solution was based on judgments and choices linked to that particular historical moment. As such, it came to be seen as partial and inadequate in the course of time. Nevertheless, anyone who took up the challenge posed by this issue could not but make use of the arsenal of conceptual tools, and particularly of the overall frame of reference created by Hegel. Like it or not, the dialectical method as rule and paradigm shaping our philosophical representation and mental image of the Enlightenment has dominated the scene since Hegel, down to our own times—although this may today be more a matter of reading between the lines than of explicit expression. In fact, however, Hegel’s success in this regard rested on solid bases. In contrast to the utopian and optimistic formulations expressed by Kant within the framework of the philosophy of reflection in his Was ist Aufklärung? Hegel provided a realistic depiction of the many shadows and contradictions that lurked behind the lights, among them a depiction of the way in which emancipatory reason had turned into its very opposite with the barbarity of the Reign of Terror, and of the dramatic and historical import of the wounds and the estrangement that the principle of subjectivity inflicted on the history of the Western world in the process of breaking with the past and its traditions.
Taking a long view of things, as indeed his goal of defining the Enlightenment from the starting point of the life of the Absolute Spirit required, Hegel had not only denounced the negative results of a project of liberation that centered exclusively on the autonomy of the individual and of a reason that was still wholly anchored to its subject. He had also pointed out the need for a new philosophy of conciliation capable of overcoming the crisis that had erupted with the onset of modernity in art and religion. No wonder, then, that the Enlightenment’s dialectical movement has become the route necessarily taken by anyone who is interested in reflecting on the destiny of mankind from the starting point of the project of a new humanism formulated by Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Filangieri, Jefferson, and many others.