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30FaithAndEnlightenment.mp3
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Faith and Enlightenment
For Hegel, this move beyond the alienated world of culture can take two directions, either as 'faith' or as 'pure insight', where the former seeks reconciliation in a 'beyond' outside the individual subject, while the latter seeks reconciliation by turning inward, to the self that can remain unsullied by the vanity of the social world:
The essence of faith . . . becomes a supersensible world which is essentially an 'other' in relation to self-consciousness. In pure insight, on the other hand, the transition of pure thought into significance of a merely negative content, a content which is reduced to a moment and returns into the self; that is to say, only the self is really the object of the self, or the object only has truth so far as it has the form of the self.
Hegel goes on to contrast faith and pure insight according to how they respond to cultural consciousness. On the one hand, faith accepts the claim of Rameau's nephew, that 'the real world is a soulless existence'; but it gets beyond the nephew's despair by setting up another world in which true satisfaction can be found. On the other hand, pure insight acknowledges the nephew's cynical claims that genius and talent have no real meaning or significance, but learns from this a kind of liberal egalitarianism, where all are seen as equally capable of using their reason, and hence as equally valuable: '[Individuality] counts merely as something universally acknowledged, viz. as an educated individuality'. With this turn towards a rationalistic humanism, Hegel takes us on to the next part of the section, where his discussion of the Enlightenment tries to bring out how 'faith' and 'pure insight' come to be opposed to one another, and thus how neither can bring satisfaction to consciousness.
This discussion has attracted much interest, as it is a matter of controversy whether Hegel should be interpreted as a counter-Enlightenment figure, or whether (on the contrary) he represents perhaps the highest expression of the ideals and ambitions of the Aufklarer. In my view, Croce was closest to the truth, when he remarked that '[Hegel] did not simply reject the Enlightenment from which he too originated, but resolved it into a more profound and complex rationalism' (Croce; translation modified); that is, Hegel's ambivalence towards the Enlightenment as such is explained by his conviction that it failed to achieve what it promised, and it must therefore all be 'done again' in a more satisfactory way. In his earlier work, Faith and Knowledge, Hegel had made clear how this was particularly true of the relation between reason and faith: far from setting reason above faith in a proper manner, the Enlightenment had only succeeded in reintroducing a new form of irrationalism, because of the simplistic way in which it conceived of the issues religious thought raises: 'Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of faith once more', because the Enlightenment's superficial critique left faith untouched, so that it is to faith rather than to the Enlightenment that philosophy has returned. It is in order to avoid this return to an anti-rationalism that sets 'the Absolute . . . beyond Reason' that the Enlightenment's earlier attack on faith must be revisited, and 'resolved' into something more satisfactory. Thus, though Hegel takes faith in a sense more seriously than many of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, by seeing it as a fundamental aspect of consciousness that runs deep, he does so because he thinks that otherwise rationalism will itself become trivialized and one-sided, leaving it vulnerable to faith once more.
Hegel characterizes the Enlightenment's superficial and purely negative view of faith at the outset of his discussion in the Phenomenology:
[Pure insight] knows that faith is opposed to pure insight, opposed to Reason and truth . . . It sees faith in general to be a tissue of superstitions, prejudices, and errors . . . The masses are the victims of the deception of a priesthood which, in its envious conceit, holds itself to be the sole possessor of insight and pursues its other selfish ends as well . . . From the stupidity and confusion of the people brought about by the trickery of priestcraft, despotism, which despises both, draws for itself the advantage of undisputed domination and the fulfilment of its desires and caprices, but is itself at the same time this same dullness of insight, the same superstition and error.
Faced with this 'tissue of superstition', the Enlightenment sets out to liberate the 'general mass' of the people, whose 'naive consciousness' has become corrupted but who can be brought over to 'pure insight': it therefore finds it surprisingly easy to topple the idols of faith, which confirms for it how insubstantial and empty religious consciousness is:
'the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for adoration has in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin'. At the same time, the Enlightenment sees itself as bringing about a kind of 'new fanfare of an intellectual revolution, 'as a sheer uproar and a violent struggle with its antithesis'.
In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel memorably calls the Enlightenment 'a hubub of vanity without a firm core'; he now explores the emptiness of this vanity in the Phenomenology, arguing that it loses all substance and integrity by failing to see the real significance of the outlook that it attacks so contemptuously:
We have therefore to see how pure insight and intention behaves in its negative attitude to that 'other' which it finds confronting it. Pure insight and intention which takes up a negative attitude can only be – since its Notion is all essentiality and there is nothing outside it – the negative of itself. As insight, therefore, it becomes the negative of pure insight, becomes untruth and unreason, and, as intention, it becomes the negative of pure intention, becomes a lie and insincerity of purpose.
Hegel argues that the shallowness of the Enlightenment can be seen in the way in which its supposedly devastating critique of religious consciousness reveals itself as superficial in the eyes of faith.
Thus, against the claim that the object of faith does not exist outside the believer's own consciousness, the believer can respond that far from being 'new wisdom', this is what it has always held, in viewing the deity and itself as one. Second, this first charge is in tension with the claim that religious belief is a deception brought about by priests and despots: for if the object of faith is something it has created, how can it be 'alien' to it?: 'How are delusion and deception to take place where consciousness in its truth has directly the certainty of itself, when in its object it possesses its own self, since it just as much finds as produces itself in it?'. In fact, Hegel claims, the Enlightenment's conspiracy-theory view of religion is simply incredible to the believer: 'the idea of delusion is quite out of the question'. Third, the Enlightenment condemns faith for worshipping mere objects like pieces of stone, blocks of wood or wafers made of bread; but of course faith does not revere any such merely physical things. Fourth, the Enlightenment attacks the Bible as a historical document; but faith has no such reliance on external evidence, and only a religious consciousness that has been corrupted by the Enlightenment could think otherwise. Finally, the Enlightenment accuses faith of a foolish asceticism and self-denying disregard for material property. But faith easily shows the worldliness of pure insight to be empty of real value, in holding 'a meal or the possession of things . . . to be an End in itself', while also being hypocritical: '[Pure insight] affirms as a pure intention the necessity of rising above natural existence, above acquisitiveness about the means of existence; only it finds it foolish and wrong that this elevation should be demonstrated by deeds; in other words, this pure insight is in truth a deception, which feigns and demands an inner elevation, but declares that it is superfluous, foolish, and even wrong to be in earnest about it, to put this elevation into actual practice and demonstrate its truth . . . It is thus that Enlightenment lets itself be understood by faith'.
Hegel then turns from an examination of the Enlightenment's critical position, to its positive position, again as viewed through the eyes of faith: 'If all prejudice and superstition have been banished, the question arises, What next? What is the truth Enlightenment has propagated in their stead?'. Here once more Hegel suggests that faith can rightly feel unimpressed. For first, in so far as the Enlightenment has a place for God at all, it will be as the empty God of deism, a mere 'vacuum to which no determinations, no predicates, can be attributed'. Second, the Enlightenment returns us to the simplistic empiricism of Observing Reason. Third, the Enlightenment adopts the value-system of utility, and an instrumental view of the world and others: 'Just as everything is useful to man, so man is useful too, and his vocation is to make himself a member of the group, of use to the common good and serviceable to all'. To all this, Hegel claims, faith will respond with disgust. Despite this, Hegel argues, the Enlightenment serves an important role in forcing faith to deepen its self-understanding, and in preventing it from becoming dogmatic irrationalism: thus, while to a consciousness with faith the Enlightenment merely appears to be hostile, in fact it helps bring out the way in which faith tries to mediate and relate God and man, revelation and reason, inner and outer, and so stops faith from becoming one-sided: 'Consequently, [the Enlightenment] is neither alien to faith, nor can faith disavow it'. At the same time, the Enlightenment is insufficiently dialectical about its own position vis-a-vis faith, in failing to see how much common ground they share. Thus, for example, while the Enlightenment helps to remind faith that God cannot be alien to the believer, by talking of God as a 'product of consciousness', the Enlightenment insists on taking this in a merely negative way, as if it were thereby overturning faith, without seeing that this is something that faith can incorporate. Likewise, the Enlightenment saves faith from the worship of mere finite things (stone, wood, bread); but it does so while itself thinking of things in a purely materialistic manner. Also, the Enlightenment helps remind faith of the insignificance of historical evidence to religious understanding, while at the same time thinking that such evidence is the only grounds for belief there can be. Finally, the Enlightenment saves faith from the hypocrisy of its asceticism, which involves the token sacrifice of goods in a way that is essentially meaningless; but again, the Enlightenment moves too quickly from this valid criticism, to thinking that no attempt to control the desire for pleasure has any significance. Nonetheless, while the Enlightenment can help faith to develop into a more sophisticated religious standpoint (hence its effectiveness), this will not be immediately apparent to faith itself, since it will initially seem to the faithful that the Enlightenment has simply destroyed all the old certainties:
Enlightenment, then, holds an irresistible authority over faith because, in the believer's own consciousness, are found the very moments which Enlightenment has established as valid. Examining the effects of this authority more closely, its behaviour towards faith seems to rend asunder the beautiful unity of trust and immediate certainty, to pollute its spiritual consciousness with mean thoughts of sensuous reality, to destroy the soul which is composed and secure in its submission, by the vanity of the Understanding and of self-will and self-fulfilment. But as a matter of fact, the result of the Enlightenment is rather to do away with the thoughtless, or rather non-notional, separation which is present in faith.
To the religious believer, therefore, it initially appears that while the enlightened consciousness may claim to have found satisfaction, it has left faith behind. However, Hegel observes, faith may be wrong about this, for it may prove harder than the enlightened consciousness thinks to achieve satisfaction if it leaves faith estranged in this way, and sticks merely to a this-worldly philosophy of materialism and utilitarianism: 'we shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satisfied; that yearning of the troubled Spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritual world lurks in the background'.
The Enlightenment, Hegel claims, is essentially split between two camps, of deism on the one hand and materialism on the other, where in fact for both camps the central categories of God and matter are equally abstract and empty. Underlying both, however, is an essential humanism, and a commitment to the happiness of mankind as the fundamental value – that is, a commitment to utility: 'The Useful is the object in so far as self-consciousness penetrates it and has in it the certainty of its individual self, its enjoyment (its being-for-self) . . . The two worlds are reconciled and heaven is transplanted to earth below'. Hegel has warned us, however, that such optimism is premature: the shadow is cast in the following part of this section, entitled 'Absolute Freedom and Terror', where Hegel offers his famous analysis of the French Revolution.
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