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Romanticized Enlightenment? Enlightened Romanticism? Universalism and Particularism in Hegel's Understanding of the Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Terry Pinkard
Terry Pinkard*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

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.

Type
Hegel and the Enlightenment
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 18 , Issue 1: number 35 , Spring/Summer 1997 , pp. 18 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1997

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References

1 Nicolin, Günther, (ed) Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970). #107, p 76 Google Scholar.

2 Hegel, G W F, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans Miller, A V) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶565, pp 344–345 Google Scholar; Hegel, , Phänomenologie des Geistes (ed Hoffmeister, J) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1955), pp 401–402 Google Scholar.

3 See The Economist, March 16, 1996: “Enemies of the Enlightenment.”Google Scholar

4 This kind of reading appears, for example, in Dorinda Outram's The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; her source for this, which seems to be source for many of those who also interpret Hegel in this way is hinchman, Lewis, Hegel's Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984)Google Scholar.

5 See Sheehan, James, German History: 1770-1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p 215 Google Scholar.

6 See “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” in Hegel, G W F, ed by Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971)Google Scholar Werke, vol 1, pp 234–236 Google Scholar.

7 Dickie's, Laurence Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar makes this error in trying to see Hegel's thought as exclusively anchored in the religious and political issues he brought with him from his Württemberg upbringing. Dickie severely, to my mind, underestimates the way in which Hegel felt himself compelled to plunge more deeply into the most ‘foundational’ issues in speculative philosophy — through an intensive reading and study of Kant's and Fichte's works — in order to realize his earlier more religious and political ambitions. Hegel's development in Jena cannot be understood outside of that context, and the attempt to make it all a function of his “political” and “religious” interests is simply too reductionist as an explanation to account for what was motivating Hegel during that period.

8 See Pippin, Robert, “Hegel, Ethical Reasons, Kantian Rejoinders,” in Pippin, Robert, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp 92–128 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Henry Allison takes this up as the “incorporation thesis” in his Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). p 40 Google Scholar. On similar themes see, Pippin, Robert, “Hegel's Ethical Rationalism,” in Pippin, , Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, pp 417–450 Google Scholar.

9 The terms, “minded” and “like-minded” are taken from Jonathan Lear's discussion of Wittgenstein in his “The Disappearing ‘We’,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LVIII (1984). pp 219–242 Google Scholar. My discussion of Hegel's conception of Geist is deeply informed by Lear's treatment of the issue in Wittgenstein's philosophy, although I think that Lear wrongly interprets the Hegelian position in that piece. A detailed treatment of the differences and similarities between Wittgenstein and Hegel would, however, take up too much space here.

10 Hegel, G W F, “Begriffslehre für die Oberklasse (1809/10),” in Moldenhauer, and Michel, (eds) Werke, vol 4, pp 142–143 (§13)Google Scholar.

11 Robert Stern objected in an earlier version of the paper that this would nonetheless not answer any lingering skeptical doubts we might still entertain about whether we really are ‘getting it right.’ Stern's objection deserves more space than can be given it here, but I can at least give a short sketch of what I would take Hegel's reply to Stern's objection to be. In one respect, Hegel is not trying to answer the skeptic with any kind of “transcendental argument” to show that the skeptic is inherently self-refuting; like Wittgenstein, Hegel is trying to dissolve the question of skepticism rather than offer a particular solution to it. But unlike Wittgenstein, Hegel does not think that our “dissolving” the question shows it to be a false problem, some kind of illusion to which we are inevitably led by virtue of the structure of our language (or whatever). For Hegel, at one point in our history, we needed to be skeptics because of the way in which our collective projects and aspirations had taken shape; in modern life, however, with its underlying norms of freedom, and the way in which it has come to care about things by virtue of the way its previous concerns had undermined themselves and thus left us dissatisfied with them, we no longer need to be skeptics. In his Science of Logic, Hegel offers a further diagnosis of why ‘we moderns’ no longer need to be skeptics. There he argues that modern skepticism of the Cartesian variety operates on the model of “reflection” (treated in the logic of “Essence”). The skeptic does not pay attention to the conditions of his own judgmental activity; the modern skeptic claims to be making a judgment based on his immediate experience and noting how that experience does not imply that the world really is that way; in actuality, Hegel argues, he is making a reflective judgment involving a reflective move to the idea that there is something more to our experience of the world than just our experience of the world. Without such a move, the skeptical position cannot make sense — without the reflectively established pair, “the way the world seems to be” and “the way the world might really be,” modern skepticism cannot even get started Hegel also wishes to show that early modern thought in its Cartesian form needed to be “reflective” in that sense, but that we moderns (that is, post-Hegelians) have to come to see that we require a non-reflective conception of the world, namely, that found in the doctrine of the Concept in the Logic. It is in the move from “Essence” to “Concept” in the Logic that skepticism supposedly dissolves; after the “Concept,” we no longer need it, it no longer remains a temptation for us, and we can respectfully simply sidestep it.

12 In the “Tübingen essay” written shortly after his departure from the Protestant Seminary in Tübingen, Hegel accused Enlightenment criticism of religion as embodying the “arrogance typical of adolescents… having got a couple of insights out of books they begin scoffing at beliefs they had up to now, like everyone else, unquestioningly accepted. In this process, vanity plays a major role.” “Tübingen Essay,” in Hegel, , Three Essays, 1793-1795 (edited and translated by Fuss, Peter and Dobbins, John) (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1984). p 44 Google Scholar; Moldenhauer, and Michel, (eds), Werke, p 27 Google Scholar.

13 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, (trans Smith, N K) (London: Macmillan and Co, 1964). A68=B93Google Scholar.

14 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, (trans Smith, N K), A69=B94Google Scholar.

15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, (trans Anscombe, G E M) (New York: MacMillan Company, 1953). ¶241Google Scholar.

16 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, (trans Pluhar, Werner S) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). §40, p 160 (A 294)Google Scholar.

17 See Pippin, Robert, “Avoiding German Idealism: Kant and the Reflective Judgment Problem,” forthcoming in Pippin, Robert, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, pp 129–156 Google Scholar.

18 See Hegel, G W F, “Rede zum Schuljahrabschluß am 14. September, 1810,” Moldenhauer, and Michel, (eds) Werke, Vol 4, pp 332–334 Google Scholar.

19 Hegel's critique of what he saw as Kant's formalism was thus, at least implicitly, part and parcel of his more general critique of the Enlightenment as embodying what he called in his 1802 essay, Glauben und Wissen (“Faith and Knowledge”) the Enlightenment's “vanity.” The Enlightenment conception of reason — and of the idea of unbiased observation, ironic detachment, and the like — was an excessively formal conception that pretended, as it were, to carry content within itself; it was “vanity” because it used the auspices of reason to license as universally valid what were only the sectarian norms of a particular community. It would have been to no surprise to Hegel that later historians of the Enlightenment would notice that side by side with the Enlightenment's pretended universalism was a concern with the difference exhibited by particular communities and groups of people — “exotics” and women — from the putative rational community of Enlightenment men (although Hegel, of course, continued to share in some of the views of women that came to prominence in the Enlightenment).

20 For more detail about the importance of the aristocratic ideal and its collapse for Hegel's sense of the groundlessness of European life, see my Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). pp 150-165 and 179–184 Google Scholar.

21 Hegel, G W F, Phenomenology of Spirit (transl. Miller, A.V.) ¶591, p 360 Google Scholar; Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Hoffmeister edition), p 418 Google Scholar. In an earlier version of this paper, Robert Wokler questioned whether in fact this concept of utility plays any real role in Hegel's discussion of the Revolution in the Phenomenology at all. Indeed, in Hegel's discussion in that section of the Revolution in the Phenomenology, the focus in fact seems to be Rousseau's idea of the “general will” and how a Rousseauian general will inevitably breaks down into factions despite Rousseau's intentions. Wokler's point is well taken, since Rousseau clearly serves as the background to much of Hegel's discussion in that section of the book. Hegel does, however, introduce the concept of utility as the outcome of Enlightenment thought in the section immediately preceding his discussion of the Revolution. The Enlightenment appeals to the concept of utility inevitably came up against Rousseau's charge that we can only determine what desires we are to satisfy after we have ascertained which desires are really our own. This objection shifts the idea of what sustains the collective aspirations of the community away from a putatively objective ideal (such as utility) to the idea of what it would mean for the members of the community to be self-determining, with how, that is, an individual can come to see his socially shaped desires as nonetheless shaped by him, with how he can see his own will as continuous with the will of others. Hegel's charge is that this conception of self-determination, so crucial for modern life's self-understanding, inevitably collapses into the Terror of the Revolution because of its emptiness. The only criterion available to it was the criterion that it itself had rejected, namely, utility. The Revolution as representative of the whole society must maintain its independence and self-determination; it must therefore blunt the attacks of those who wish to challenge it, to limit its ability to determine itself. Since the logic of the Revolution as the embodiment of the “General Will” is that the ends of individual agents are continuous with those of the “General Will”, the “General Will” becomes conceived as a kind of higher-order person in itself which includes the supposedly independent persons within itself; the particular government — that is, faction — that strikes out at its opponents is thus not by its own lights striking against its opponents but is merely the whole defending itself against some of its parts that have already, according to the logic of the situation, accepted the authority of the whole to do such things. This is of course the utilitarian conception of things, in which the pains and pleasures of individuals are scooped up and amalgamated into an overall stew of pains and pleasures; the subjectivity and individuality of the agents is submerged into the abstraction of society as a ‘single person’ and the road to the guillotine is prepared. (It also should be remembered that one of Hegel's earliest dissatisfactions with the Enlightenment had to do with what he saw as its shallow appeal to ideas such as utility.) I explore the link with Rousseau and the idea of self-determination at some length in my Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, pp 179-187.