Thank you for the Voltaire Foundation for inviting me to give this lecture.
Tis a great honour to be giving the best of my lecture.
So hey gives enlightenment. Well, the Enlightenment for Hegel was a moment of epochal significance.
Ever since, the period has continued to enjoy a pivotal importance in the annals of Western historiography.
Hegel's outlook, as one might expect, was world historical in character.
He thought that monumental authority had been prized in ancient Egypt, just as the beauty of the polis stood at the centre of Athenian life.
For the moderns, on the other hand. Reason played a determining role.
The Enlightenment accordingly was the age of reason.
Modern scholars have variously queried this conclusion.
They've even questioned the existence of the Enlightenment as such.
For. For some, like JJ Pocock, the Enlightenment is best understood as a plurality of perspectives,
that is as enlightenment instead of a single enlightenment.
For others like de Klerk, the Enlightenment is nothing other than a belated construction, an historiographical fiction, if you like.
Both conclusions, it seems to me, are unnecessarily agnostic.
COX Few, I believe, is excessively historicism.
The Enlightenment for him, and I quote, is a term of historiographical art, widely adopted in Anglophone discourse only from the mid 20th century.
Well, first of all, I think it's fair to say this statement is, strictly speaking, untrue,
since Hegel refers to the alcohol and to gayness and proved influential in Britain, Germany and France, of course, elsewhere to Poland, Russia, China.
But clocks procedure, I think we can say in any case would disqualify any historical depiction,
which was not the self characterisation of the era under discussion.
So if this were right, then historians could only parrot and never describe.
Along with John Robertson, I'm inclined to accept that the Enlightenment did in fact exist.
Pocock's plurality of perspective of proposed plurality.
Well, that presupposes a singular phenomenon which can of course be differentiated into multiple points of view.
This doesn't. This does not turn, however, the Enlightenment into a movement or a doctrine.
Hegel's understanding anticipated this qualification or negative qualification.
The Enlightenment, as he used it, was certainly an external description, but it represented a period driven by a controversy.
From this vantage point, the Enlightenment encompassed disagreement about enlightenment.
That is, it covered an era that was divided about the role of reason in society.
Why the Enlightenment in Hegel signalled a seismic shift.
It was part it was part for him of a longer trajectory, embracing the era of Christian Europe to analyse what had what had happened.
Hegel resorted to a number of terms relevant to both the period and the process that propelled us.
In this lecture, I want to unpack the meaning of Hegel's terms.
These include enlightenment of classical, perfectibility, perfectibility,
which he adopted from Rousseau and culture, sometimes rendered as couture, sometimes as Belgian.
But I also want to consider the substance that underlay these concepts.
Ultimately, Hegel wanted to probe the relationship between society, religion and the state.
He was above all preoccupied with the modern alignment between these forces by comparison with the situation in the ancient world.
In practice, this impelled him to address the limits of morality and government.
However, morality historically was the province of religion, but more recently it was subject to the decrees of philosophy.
This generated competition between the two domains, which in the end spelt conflict between the church and the universities.
I shall conclude my lecture this evening by homing in on the importance of exactly this emerging contest.
We've already seen that Hagel's enlightenment is both the generic period, the Enlightenment under specific dynamic operative within the period,
namely enlightenment, as both the advent and process of autonomous reasoning.
As Hegel outlined matters in the phenomenology of Spirit, the period comprised two opposing starkly opposing attitudes.
These two dominant he denominated faith Glauber on one side and enlightenment.
As you now know of Claire home on the other as readers of the phenomenology.
When no their collision spilled over into the struggles of the French Revolution,
Heinrich Hegel explored the encounter between them in the third subsection of his account
of the fate of biltong or Kosher Hegel's name for the age in which enlightenment prevails.
Both terms are equally important to form in this context.
In this way, Hegel's analysis of the French Revolution pivots around the spread of alcohol in a society infused with values shaped by Belgian.
He goes. Framing was indebted to an earlier generation of thinkers.
Some decades before the publication of the From Phenomenology, Moses Mendelssohn remarked in an essay,
an essay which Hegel had in fact transcribed himself during his school days that the terms
of clear home culture and building were all recent additions to the German language.
They were newly minted pieces of specialised vocabulary, if you like.
The social role of each of them had become a matter of general concern.
They were soon to play a decisive role in the writings of Gerta and Kant.
Above all, the terms had come to occupy a significant place in histories of progress with evident deaths to Rousseau and Scottish social theory.
I thought I've already intimated.
Central to the debate was the role of philosophy in society, including its impact on religion, morals and government.
Plainly, this wrangling did not begin in 1780s Prussia.
It had raged in England and France earlier in the 18th century.
As a result, the German category of enlightenment has come to acquire a broader range of application,
sometimes being used, as earlier noted, to refer to the age as a whole.
Yet the German debate had its own peculiar complexion, determined in part by Frederick the Great himself.
For Frederick as for Kant. The Age, though not yet fully enlightened, was at least an age of enlightenment, since transparency,
guided policy, government, public policy, and the freedom to publish protected criticism.
Elsewhere,
Frederick expressed more scepticism about the wisdom of public truthfulness or the advisability of complete honesty with all sections of the public.
This contrasted with the arguments of one of his philosophical correspondents, Jean-Baptiste,
tell him about their disagreement, raised general questions about how to enlighten the multitude.
This led the king to tell them various prompting to hold an essay competition under the auspices of
the Berlin Academy of Sciences on whether there were benefits to deceiving the people at large.
Well. Hagel later recalled the subject of the competition while examining the struggle between enlightenment and superstition,
a chapter of his in the phenomenology.
He then invoked the episode again in his discussion of public opinion in the philosophy of Right.
In explaining the persistence of popular superstition, Fredrick had derided instruction in schools and universities.
For his part, Wilhelm moves in a contemporary and a prominent member of The Secret Berlin Wednesday,
Society wondered why prejudice was still widespread across the territory, across the Prussian territory.
That is, despite the celebrated efforts of the monarch himself.
Kant noted in the same spirit that dispelling the prejudices of the masses would prove both complicated and protracted.
It was not a matter for precipitate revolution.
A public account wrote, can achieve enlightenment only slowly.
Mendelsohn can't untangle much like Lessing had,
our Sheila and sister took an interest in the dynamics of enlightenment in the
context of a more of a more general concern with the education of the human race.
So long, long,
long term historical projections they wish that is true contributes to a debate about the intellectual and moral development of the species.
So the terms, vocation, perfectibility and culture were integral to the discussion in the lectures on the philosophy of world history.
Hegel proposed that history itself should be viewed as a kind of accumulated discipline, a sort.
It's his phrase involved the gradual schooling of the human will, whereby natural inclinations were increasingly subject to rationalisation.
Rousseau had termed this capacity the faculty of self perfection.
Central to the experience of discipline for Hegel was precisely the activity of self-discipline.
Raw impulses were perfected that is refined by reflection under the influence of both instrumental and moral reasoning.
Will this activity of cultivation explain to the advance of Hegel's key term spirit?
Geist progressed by means of a progress of on.
Hagel's argument drew indirectly on analysis of the passage from rudeness to refinement formulated in the works of HUME, Smith, Ferguson and Miller.
Yes, his position was clearly informed by the German idealist insight that civilisation was as
much a product of a free self-development as it was an effect of the forces of nature.
This did not mean that humans made their history as a matter of choice.
It meant instead that they cultivated their desires even as they were subject to the effects of their appetites.
This aptitude was the basic building block of civilisation,
distinguishing the uneventful character of animal existence from the ever changing variety of human life.
Fields, cultivated, cities built, technology developed and so on.
As I've already implied.
Whereas building in Hegel generally refer to the process of refinement and cultivation that underlies the development of Geist,
it also had a narrower meaning applicable to society in 17th and 18th century France.
The age of Belgium in this sense was the era of politeness within this epoch.
Rationality and credulity vied for ascendancy.
I turn now to the drama of their competition, the competition between these two dispositions as depicted in Hegel's phenomenology.
So for Hegel, the world of modern biltong is a condition of universal alienation in which mutual dependence thwarts freedom.
Under these conditions, as Hegel presented things, rival approaches to intellectual authority confronted one another.
On one side stood faith Sloper, as I've mentioned on the other insight his term for reason.
But in the original, the phrase is I insist.
Unlike the unhappy consciousness of early Christianity,
modern faith wielded secular power even as it pined after its own thought world projected into the beyond Hegel's world for Word for Heaven.
Unlike Stoicism, this longing found expression in a flight into a fictional yet imaginatively rich
realm as depicted in the in the lavish religious artworks of early modern Europe.
Despite this wealth in terms of aesthetic representation, the true object of faith.
Thus, to say God remains obscure at once, remote and incomprehensible reason or insight by comparison placed value in the hidden sphere.
It was a secular enterprise. What a prize was, the activity of self-consciousness itself in seeking to eliminate error.
That's what reasoning did. So is how you described it.
Reason operated by means of conceptual differentiation directed against the principles advocated by faith.
It had no content other than the values it rejected.
It undermined, eroded and sabotaged where it was faith aimed at approved standards,
transcending the vanity of this veil of tears inside cherished purity of intention
and opposition to the corrupt practices associated with institutionalised religion.
However, the conflict, the confrontation was marked by mutual misunderstanding,
not least because Reason was determined to downgrade religion without comprehending what gave rise to its characteristic attitudes.
So Hagel stylised presentation well in his stylised presentation rather.
While Faith was initially happy to pursue its own tranquil course.
Inside all reason was motivated to contend with its assumptions.
In this spirit, reason aim to challenge all aspects of religious belief.
Well, first it parodied Christianity's conception of the divinity by equating its idea of God with representational images like crucifixes,
crucifixes and wood or stone or the wafer of the host.
Next, it sought to subvert the grounds of belief, not least by exposing the narratives of biblical revelation.
And finally, reason denounced the ethical implications of faith by undermining all forms of service.
Above all, its attempts to bring about salvation by token gestures like abstinence or charity.
In general, insight castigated religious conviction as a mental figment whilst refusing to examine the sources of its commitments.
The sheer learning Hegel's phrase that informed the Christian religion was left unexplained and unexplored.
Yet, despite their divergence,
insight and faith share two basic tenets of rational procedure enabling reason to get a foothold inside, as it were, the enemy camp.
This was secured by means of publicity and processes.
Philosophy appeals to public opinion over the heads of the ecclesiastical authorities on the power of centralised government.
This critical spirit extended itself by insinuation rather than violence.
As Hegel wrote in a famous passage, which I quote,
The communication of pure insight is comparable to a quiet expansion or the diffusion of, say, a perfume in the resisting atmosphere.
It is a penetrating infection which does not make itself noticeable beforehand.
There was this process of dissemination that Hegel turned termed enlightenment.
He cited Rameau's nephew on the subtle ascent of Christianity as propagated by minister by missionaries in China.
On the back of incremental infiltration.
Suddenly, one fine morning, the old idol crashed to the ground.
In this vein, enlightenment helped trigger revolution.
Yet. It also needs to be borne in mind that philosophy for Hegel was not by any stretch, the exclusive cause of this process of transformation.
Enlightenment instead was partly symptomatic.
The roots of the crash is to say of revolution lie deeper in cumulative normative shifts, cultural shifts, as we might say.
Crucial to this process was the passage of society from the culture of honour to the
value of utility from in from interpersonal amour prop to the impersonal market.
In Hegel's mind,
the atheism and deism that came to prominence in the period like it endorsed the ascendancy of utility or utilitarianism or useful reciprocity.
Even Orthodox religion came to base itself on a vision of the world as a garden planted for humanity's benefit.
The bonds of social life, much like the structure of the universe, were presumed to be held together by utilitarian exchange.
This conception became central to enlightenment, which helps to legitimise a form of value that had become begun to establish itself.
Philosophy, Hegel observed, is merely one aspect of a larger, a larger whole, a larger intellectual, social, whole.
At the same time, its role as a determinant of historical change was itself circumstantially variable for the Greeks, as Hegel put it.
Philosophy had come too late. It made its entrance when the substance of Athenian ethical life faced dissolution.
So with the advent of Plato, its culture was already dissolving its practitioners.
Accordingly, as Hegel put it, withdrew from the affairs of the state.
Yet with the Enlightenment philosophy acquired a more directly formative significance and focussed its energy,
at least in France, on social and political renewal.
For this reason, Hegel could argue that the revolution received its first stimulus and Reagan from philosophy.
In an age when thought mattered, enlightenment could prove decisive.
Nonetheless, although philosophy made a difference, it did not determine the shape of the future.
In fact, its impact in France, in the French context, was largely destructive since it misconceived its own function.
It mistook its obstruction from prevailing circumstances for practical leverage.
Philosophy to be effective needs to work with the grain of history.
However, in France, it became a vehicle for angry opposition following its descent into the void.
As we have by now, come to see Hegel's style of argumentation traded in large agglomeration categories like culture, faith and enlightenment.
Yet he perfectly appreciated the more intricate reality that underlay these, in effect, ideal types.
Enlightenment itself was no exception. Inside the generic concept, he often adopted a more specific usage.
In the narrowest sense, he associated along with the popular philosophy.
Popular philosophy. The prospered in Germany between the heyday of populism and the arrival of the mature Immanuel Kant.
Its watchwords were sound, reason and common sense, and its adherents included figures like Java, Theta, Vice Haupt, Eberhardt and Nikolai.
Some of these thinkers directed that far against positive religion.
That's to say, against the tenets of revelation and ecclesiastical structures.
Hegel found aspects of the same critical disposition in Britain and France as well.
Yet how is the impact of insight in all three countries to be different?
In Britain, for instance, not least under Scottish influence, the conclusions of philosophy apparently reinforce the power of custom in human affairs.
The Germans, for their part, took ultimate value to lie in the human faculty of self-consciousness.
However, this did not result in burning rage against the establishment.
Accordingly, according to Hegel, only in France did philosophy now itself,
specifically dubbed Enlightenment, seek to abolish all religious ideas and every reigning institution.
Ultimately, it was the French Enlightenment that rebelled against and I quote Hegel,
the condition of the world as legally established against the Constitution of the state,
the administration of justice, the mode of government, political authority, and likewise against art.
As Hegel described us, in the place of all these tangible structures that emerged,
the consciousness of perfect liberty and the subsection of the phenomenology and absolute freedom and terror.
This consciousness is identified with the concept of the will as formulated in the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
So the Enlightenment in Hegel covered a set of individuals as well as referring to a trans historical process.
This last was the process of rationalisation designated by Rousseau with the term perfectibility.
Among the Scots, this was regarded as an empirical process depicted in terms of the dynamics of refinement.
The process of rationalisation. Hegel had social and intellectual dimensions.
It affected both manners and philosophical attitudes.
In the latter case, it shaped relations between reason and faith.
Demystification confronted more traditional forms of attachment to meaning.
US is by now plane. This confrontation led Hagel to depict the age in general terms by resort to the peer to the period concept, the Enlightenment.
From this point of view,
the Enlightenment was the era in which faith and reason tangled with an intensity that shook the foundations of the Christian churches.
As we have seen, the standoff had different implications different European countries and Germany.
The impact was more cultural than political or better.
It took the form of cultural revision rather than political revolution from Hegel's perspective.
In the longer term, the former win, in fact, proved more consequential than the latter.
Because Hegel regarded cultural change as more profound and durable than transitory political upheavals,
Much of his attention focussed on the intellectual content of his immediate surroundings.
Above all, he sought to evaluate philosophical developments within his own given milieu.
There were two presiding influences to consider.
One was the revival, the revival of and the revolt against Spiritualism.
The other was the fall out from the philosophy of count.
I shall soon turn to the significant significance of Kant in Hegel's story.
But first, let me consider a key individual, a figure key in the Spinoza Revival, the publicist and philosopher Friedrich Jacobi.
A revival in a revival of interest in spiritualism in late 18th century Germany was partly triggered by Jacoby's letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza,
in which famously, Jacobi exposed Lessing's allegiance to the tenets of pantheistic belief.
This immediately aroused consternation in Mendelsohn, and it also shook the complacency of the philosophical establishment.
What's Jacobi revealed his own detailed mastery of spin artistic argument.
He also revealed what he saw as its self-contradictory consequences.
Jacoby's challenge amounted to an indictment of a model of enlightenment.
However, importantly, this was not the beginning of a counter enlightenment.
As Avi Licious has eloquently shown,
the polarities that have shaped the historiography of the period are inapplicable when dealing with the primary sources.
As I've been proposing, enlightenment in Hegel's conception meant the search for reasons.
This had implications for the discovery of truth and the adherence to duty.
In other words, it had consequences in the theoretical and the practical spheres in science and morality, as we might say.
The search for reasons meant rejecting the appeal to authority.
A proposition was true because it was rationally justified, not because it was authorised by an institution like a church or a government.
In a similar vein,
action could only be vindicated by reference to humanly generated norms not on the say so of the divinity or mediating priests or political rulers.
Now, Jacobi accepted the authority of reason against superstition.
He never appealed from the tribunal of the human mind to some higher spiritual or political authority.
Nonetheless, Jacobi did examine the destructive consequences that followed from an unmitigated, an unmitigated adherence to rational accounting.
The relentless resort to reason, which, like Hegel, Jacobi termed I insist inside.
I assume that's why Hagel used the phrase and led to a mechanistic analysis of the natural and ethical world.
Everything was conditioned by something else.
Within this construction, there was no room for a personal god or the exercise of individual freedom.
As a result, as Jacobi saw, meaning and value inevitably dissolved and nihilism, his word descended.
In the standard Christian vision. The divinity was a creative mover and an ethical tribunal.
As such, the deity was necessarily unconditioned.
But on the Cartesian spinner, spinner autistic pitcher, the unconditioned could not be known since the world was only accessible via its conditions.
Similarly, freedom of the will was undermined by a metaphysical system that described the universe
as an unbroken causal nexus if everything was a product of antecedent causes.
Then so was every case of human action.
There could be no free action. This meant that cynicism for for Jacobi was, in fact, self-defeating.
It was based on a chain of mathematical certainties about nature, which denied a set of principles that were equally self-evident.
In accepting that the universe was comprehensively conditioned, we had to abandon conspicuous truths like the Godhead and free will.
Since these truths were, in Jacoby's phrase, immediate, or as we might say, self-evident, they were instantly affirmed by belief.
For example, we could not doubt that our own actions belonged to ourselves.
A decision was a product of free choice.
Even though this faculty was not rationally demonstrated, all no human agent could plausibly deny could plausibly deny it to themselves.
It does transpires that what reason had undermined was reasserted as an article of belief or faith.
However, this faith was not the old faith.
It was instead a new species of philosophical belief that replaced the original feeds of the medieval church.
The old faith had involved an obligation to believe.
It entails submission to the tenets pronounced by an accredited authority.
By comparison, Jacobi, Glauber lacked any source of authority outside itself.
Nonetheless, on Jacobean principles, philosophy remains trapped in the antithesis between reason and faith.
It was imprisoned within the dialectic of enlightenment.
Hegel charged Kantian critical philosophy with exactly the same shortcomings as Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.
Sally Sedgwick and others have shown Hegel was substantially motivated as a thinker by the challenge posed by Kantian dualism.
Journalism's, of course, were dialectical contradictions, which were not resolve themselves or could not resolve themselves.
They offered self-defeating solutions to unavoidable dilemmas.
The same as we have seen applied to Huckabee.
His importance for Hagel has certainly been noted by commentators, but his overwhelming significance is perhaps been understated.
From Hagel's viewpoint, the H had offered a Jacobean reckoning with enlightenment, as well as attempts at Kantian Solutions.
But both fell short equally. Both approaches shaped philosophy in the decades that followed.
Jacobi is recourse to faith in immediacy or as I said, self self evidence guided marker on the romantics.
However, just as troubling for Hegel, Kant's difficulties persisted in the 1980s of his successor as above all in the work of Fisher.
As Hegel presented his mature philosophy, Kant had resolved the problem of theoretical scepticism by rendering truth relative to subjectivity.
For Hagel, however, this was simply scepticism in a new guise.
Knowledge was no longer objectively grounded, since it was no more than a construction of human consciousness.
The same fate Hegel went on had befallen Kant's moral theory.
The flaws in his system on Hegel's analysis were diverse and multifaceted.
Hale thought that Kantian ethics was right to locate moral value in the rational faculties of the individual,
though we also believe that Kant had robbed the virtues of any determinate content.
Hegel added the counterpoint moral action of effectiveness and motivation.
To solve this conundrum, Conte resorted to the use of the postulates.
This meant that while it was impossible to reconcile virtue and happiness immediately, one could postulate that ultimate harmony.
But to postulate an outcome, a techno technical term and counting epistemology is I won't go into,
but suffice to say, to postulate an outcome was not to demonstrate its necessity.
Instead it was to. It was to it was to posit a rational ground for belief.
In this way, can system the whole system like Jacoby's came to rest on the edifice of faith.
From Hegel's perspective, the Enlightenment had failed to integrate reason and religion.
He accepted. Along with Jacobi, that reason's insights deprived it of the meaning it sought.
But he further believes that Jacobi in Kant failed to escape this predicament, and in fact, the predicament that created reason demanded faith.
But faith demanded reason.
The philosophy of the 1790s had been unable to accommodate both, thus veering into scepticism, irrationalism and disappointment.
It's a musical. Hinterland.
Overcoming these difficulties was not only important for the sake of surmounting, as it were, cognitive dissonance, dissonance.
It was also essential for the health of modern politics.
As we've come to see the debate about faith and knowledge in the context of the Enlightenment was
at bottom a dispute over the relationship between philosophy and religion viewed more expansively.
This was a multi dimensional contest over the respective jurisdictions of faith, science, morals and politics.
These domains are at least partly correspond to two particular institutions the church, the university and the state.
Carnes had pondered relations between these bodies in the 1780s and nineties.
He argued that church and state dictated the terms of obedience to citizens,
while the philosophical faculties of the university could criticise their assumptions.
In other words, philosophy could scrutinise while government could enforce.
When Hegel addressed the problems bequeathed by the Enlightenment, he was entering into this very controversy.
But in doing so, he was actually with you. Me? A quarrel whose coordinates had changed since the era of Frederick the Great first in France,
A moral revolution against the state had taken place beginning in 1789.
Its Rama fine consequences dominated the European scene for the whole of Hegel's adult life.
Second, partly as a consequence of the revolution.
A rep for a representative constitutional regime moved to the centre of political discussion in Germany in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.
Kantian philosophy had largely focussed on the relationship between ethical reform and enlightened monarchy.
By comparison, Hegel's thought came to concentrate on grounding moral opinion in the context of a representative regime.
In the most general terms, Haggard regard religion and politics as serving overlapping objectives.
Though we get into tricky territory here. Each of them was a means of realising what he calls famously the absolute.
This meant that they were charged with advancing supreme value,
which is all the absolute means supreme value, but within a given historical constellation,
what was absolute in cultural life was normativity itself constructed by society over time in pursuit of the desire for freedom.
However, Hegel also noted that religion and politics serve the absolute in vitally distinct ways as far as he was concerned.
Recent conservative polemic in Germany had collapsed both enterprises into a single project,
as if religion should determine the shape and purpose of the state.
But this was to confuse and blend two related but divergent functions.
Hegel feels that reducing politics to religion would have one of two dire consequences.
It would either take the form of what he called polemical piety and lead to attempts to abolish power in the name of moral purity.
Interestingly, he thought that's more or less what the French Revolution had been.
Or else it would strive to extinguish individualism in favour of unaccountable authority, a sort of world papacy.
The first essentially was a species of enthusiasm, the second a kind of superstition.
Hagel took up these problems in the context of his theory of the state, beginning at paragraph 257 of the philosophy of right.
I want to focus the concluding portion of this lecture on on the issues that arise in this section of Hegel's text.
The crux of his account of relations between church and state is packed into paragraph 270.
In particular. Ultimately he goes treatment here, branches out into an examination of politics and education.
He indicated that education embraced two poles, the university and the church.
The university, of course, included religion.
Given that theology made up of faculty, but it also embraced science, or more technically, this and Shaft,
which in turn had at least two components physical and speculative science or empirical study and philosophy.
Given the diverse elements constituting religion, science and politics, Hegel endeavoured to figure out the interconnections between these components.
He began by noting that the June nature of modern political rather, he began by noting the dual nature of modern political regimes.
The state he wrote, and I quote, is both a universal interest as such and the conservation of particular interests within the universal interest.
In other words, a constitutional polity of the modern kind heart to serve the general interest.
It was to that extent a collective enterprise. It was the state.
However, at the same time, the modern state was characterised in terms of its enhancement of individual interests.
The contrast here was really with the ancient world. Individual interests expressed themselves in diverse ways.
First, they comprised the sphere of civil society, or, as we might say, economy.
But second, they were often composed, composed into subordinate associations.
Churches offering obvious examples for Hegel religion could operate freely under
the state so long as it did not collide with the state's fundamental values.
The church had its doctrine, and as did the state.
The former had to be reconciled on terms stipulated by the latter.
In the case of irreconcilable doctrines, for example, these are his examples on a baptism.
Quakerism and Judaism. Toleration should be practised and toleration in turn presupposed the robustness of the state.
Both church and state were spiritual enterprises.
For Hagel, a mistake he thought to regard the church as the soul of the Constitution.
While politics was left to deal mechanistic mechanistically with material needs.
Geist for Hagel meant consciousness, and consciousness spawned the human environment inclusive of all ecclesiastical and political establishments.
Moreover, the modern state was not simply a product of consciousness alone, or, as we might say.
It was not only a result of objective struggle, it was also a function of self consciousness.
In other words, the modern state was more than a creature of happenstance and customs.
It was also the outcome of deliberate self awareness in public life.
Given the reality of constitutional design, bureaucratic planning and legislation,
the various branches of the state reflected on their activities in the state, as haggled put it, knows what it wills.
Legislation, for example, is not a matter of merely reflexive behaviour.
It is instead a species of self-conscious action.
It comprises thought, foresight and deliberation.
In addition, the university reflects upon what the state knows.
For Hagel, the university, like the church, was a means to education.
It was, in effect, a form of socialisation.
But he also to the university, regarded both university and church as, as he put it, essentially ends in themselves.
They should not be governed by the state and they should not seek to govern society.
There is a distinction to be drawn between education and administration.
This observation brings me now to my final point.
For Hagel. In the end, science must take the lead in education.
Not this. And shaft. Not. Just physical science.
He thought that religion certainly involved cognition brought about through learning.
However, its precepts were largely symbolic in nature.
True religion enlightens. But it is not sufficient for enlightenment.
As Hagel argued, faith in any liberal regime must be supplemented by knowledge,
But knowledge must crystallised in the modern state was the province of philosophy and not the church,
as resolved by enlightened opinion since the days of Galileo.
In the 19th century, the centrality of knowledge brought politics into a deepening relationship with universities.
Their alliance, of course, might easily descend into conflict.
Equally philosophy might fail to reconcile various academic disciplines pitting, say, the sciences against the humanities.
Such battles grew in intensity in the final quarter of Hegel's life.
Especially during the period of the calls part Greece, the state, religion and the university jostled for position.
Given the continuance of some of these struggles in our time, it seems clear that we are still living in the shadow of Hegel's enlightenment.
Thank you very much.