1 00:00:01,910 --> 00:00:05,540 Thank you for the Voltaire Foundation for inviting me to give this lecture. 2 00:00:05,870 --> 00:00:09,170 Tis a great honour to be giving the best of my lecture. 3 00:00:10,190 --> 00:00:17,600 So hey gives enlightenment. Well, the Enlightenment for Hegel was a moment of epochal significance. 4 00:00:18,380 --> 00:00:26,300 Ever since, the period has continued to enjoy a pivotal importance in the annals of Western historiography. 5 00:00:27,080 --> 00:00:32,210 Hegel's outlook, as one might expect, was world historical in character. 6 00:00:33,900 --> 00:00:45,900 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. 7 00:00:46,530 --> 00:00:51,120 For the moderns, on the other hand. Reason played a determining role. 8 00:00:51,750 --> 00:00:55,680 The Enlightenment accordingly was the age of reason. 9 00:00:56,760 --> 00:01:00,780 Modern scholars have variously queried this conclusion. 10 00:01:01,650 --> 00:01:04,830 They've even questioned the existence of the Enlightenment as such. 11 00:01:07,640 --> 00:01:16,250 For. For some, like JJ Pocock, the Enlightenment is best understood as a plurality of perspectives, 12 00:01:16,670 --> 00:01:22,250 that is as enlightenment instead of a single enlightenment. 13 00:01:23,240 --> 00:01:32,510 For others like de Klerk, the Enlightenment is nothing other than a belated construction, an historiographical fiction, if you like. 14 00:01:33,500 --> 00:01:37,640 Both conclusions, it seems to me, are unnecessarily agnostic. 15 00:01:38,730 --> 00:01:42,480 COX Few, I believe, is excessively historicism. 16 00:01:43,260 --> 00:01:56,850 The Enlightenment for him, and I quote, is a term of historiographical art, widely adopted in Anglophone discourse only from the mid 20th century. 17 00:01:58,100 --> 00:02:04,190 Well, first of all, I think it's fair to say this statement is, strictly speaking, untrue, 18 00:02:04,490 --> 00:02:15,890 since Hegel refers to the alcohol and to gayness and proved influential in Britain, Germany and France, of course, elsewhere to Poland, Russia, China. 19 00:02:17,570 --> 00:02:25,280 But clocks procedure, I think we can say in any case would disqualify any historical depiction, 20 00:02:25,520 --> 00:02:29,960 which was not the self characterisation of the era under discussion. 21 00:02:30,800 --> 00:02:35,870 So if this were right, then historians could only parrot and never describe. 22 00:02:37,560 --> 00:02:44,160 Along with John Robertson, I'm inclined to accept that the Enlightenment did in fact exist. 23 00:02:44,830 --> 00:02:48,540 Pocock's plurality of perspective of proposed plurality. 24 00:02:48,810 --> 00:02:59,130 Well, that presupposes a singular phenomenon which can of course be differentiated into multiple points of view. 25 00:03:00,920 --> 00:03:07,730 This doesn't. This does not turn, however, the Enlightenment into a movement or a doctrine. 26 00:03:08,840 --> 00:03:15,890 Hegel's understanding anticipated this qualification or negative qualification. 27 00:03:16,160 --> 00:03:26,420 The Enlightenment, as he used it, was certainly an external description, but it represented a period driven by a controversy. 28 00:03:27,140 --> 00:03:33,020 From this vantage point, the Enlightenment encompassed disagreement about enlightenment. 29 00:03:33,560 --> 00:03:39,470 That is, it covered an era that was divided about the role of reason in society. 30 00:03:40,940 --> 00:03:44,480 Why the Enlightenment in Hegel signalled a seismic shift. 31 00:03:45,110 --> 00:03:56,240 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. 32 00:03:56,570 --> 00:04:03,830 Hegel resorted to a number of terms relevant to both the period and the process that propelled us. 33 00:04:05,110 --> 00:04:08,830 In this lecture, I want to unpack the meaning of Hegel's terms. 34 00:04:09,370 --> 00:04:15,309 These include enlightenment of classical, perfectibility, perfectibility, 35 00:04:15,310 --> 00:04:22,030 which he adopted from Rousseau and culture, sometimes rendered as couture, sometimes as Belgian. 36 00:04:22,420 --> 00:04:27,760 But I also want to consider the substance that underlay these concepts. 37 00:04:29,020 --> 00:04:36,160 Ultimately, Hegel wanted to probe the relationship between society, religion and the state. 38 00:04:37,630 --> 00:04:46,120 He was above all preoccupied with the modern alignment between these forces by comparison with the situation in the ancient world. 39 00:04:46,630 --> 00:04:52,060 In practice, this impelled him to address the limits of morality and government. 40 00:04:52,900 --> 00:05:03,130 However, morality historically was the province of religion, but more recently it was subject to the decrees of philosophy. 41 00:05:03,730 --> 00:05:11,890 This generated competition between the two domains, which in the end spelt conflict between the church and the universities. 42 00:05:12,610 --> 00:05:19,390 I shall conclude my lecture this evening by homing in on the importance of exactly this emerging contest. 43 00:05:21,460 --> 00:05:30,910 We've already seen that Hagel's enlightenment is both the generic period, the Enlightenment under specific dynamic operative within the period, 44 00:05:31,120 --> 00:05:37,330 namely enlightenment, as both the advent and process of autonomous reasoning. 45 00:05:38,490 --> 00:05:48,270 As Hegel outlined matters in the phenomenology of Spirit, the period comprised two opposing starkly opposing attitudes. 46 00:05:49,370 --> 00:05:55,850 These two dominant he denominated faith Glauber on one side and enlightenment. 47 00:05:56,390 --> 00:06:01,850 As you now know of Claire home on the other as readers of the phenomenology. 48 00:06:01,850 --> 00:06:07,190 When no their collision spilled over into the struggles of the French Revolution, 49 00:06:07,910 --> 00:06:15,320 Heinrich Hegel explored the encounter between them in the third subsection of his account 50 00:06:15,560 --> 00:06:23,590 of the fate of biltong or Kosher Hegel's name for the age in which enlightenment prevails. 51 00:06:23,690 --> 00:06:28,340 Both terms are equally important to form in this context. 52 00:06:28,730 --> 00:06:41,360 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. 53 00:06:43,370 --> 00:06:47,660 He goes. Framing was indebted to an earlier generation of thinkers. 54 00:06:48,530 --> 00:06:55,460 Some decades before the publication of the From Phenomenology, Moses Mendelssohn remarked in an essay, 55 00:06:55,610 --> 00:07:02,179 an essay which Hegel had in fact transcribed himself during his school days that the terms 56 00:07:02,180 --> 00:07:09,650 of clear home culture and building were all recent additions to the German language. 57 00:07:11,060 --> 00:07:15,170 They were newly minted pieces of specialised vocabulary, if you like. 58 00:07:16,040 --> 00:07:21,470 The social role of each of them had become a matter of general concern. 59 00:07:22,280 --> 00:07:26,600 They were soon to play a decisive role in the writings of Gerta and Kant. 60 00:07:27,290 --> 00:07:39,560 Above all, the terms had come to occupy a significant place in histories of progress with evident deaths to Rousseau and Scottish social theory. 61 00:07:40,730 --> 00:07:42,170 I thought I've already intimated. 62 00:07:42,350 --> 00:07:49,970 Central to the debate was the role of philosophy in society, including its impact on religion, morals and government. 63 00:07:50,880 --> 00:07:55,230 Plainly, this wrangling did not begin in 1780s Prussia. 64 00:07:55,920 --> 00:07:59,190 It had raged in England and France earlier in the 18th century. 65 00:07:59,970 --> 00:08:06,360 As a result, the German category of enlightenment has come to acquire a broader range of application, 66 00:08:06,600 --> 00:08:13,740 sometimes being used, as earlier noted, to refer to the age as a whole. 67 00:08:13,980 --> 00:08:21,930 Yet the German debate had its own peculiar complexion, determined in part by Frederick the Great himself. 68 00:08:22,740 --> 00:08:34,800 For Frederick as for Kant. The Age, though not yet fully enlightened, was at least an age of enlightenment, since transparency, 69 00:08:35,940 --> 00:08:43,710 guided policy, government, public policy, and the freedom to publish protected criticism. 70 00:08:45,470 --> 00:08:46,280 Elsewhere, 71 00:08:46,940 --> 00:08:59,720 Frederick expressed more scepticism about the wisdom of public truthfulness or the advisability of complete honesty with all sections of the public. 72 00:09:00,680 --> 00:09:06,020 This contrasted with the arguments of one of his philosophical correspondents, Jean-Baptiste, 73 00:09:06,020 --> 00:09:13,850 tell him about their disagreement, raised general questions about how to enlighten the multitude. 74 00:09:14,450 --> 00:09:20,929 This led the king to tell them various prompting to hold an essay competition under the auspices of 75 00:09:20,930 --> 00:09:27,230 the Berlin Academy of Sciences on whether there were benefits to deceiving the people at large. 76 00:09:28,570 --> 00:09:36,810 Well. Hagel later recalled the subject of the competition while examining the struggle between enlightenment and superstition, 77 00:09:36,820 --> 00:09:39,850 a chapter of his in the phenomenology. 78 00:09:40,690 --> 00:09:47,320 He then invoked the episode again in his discussion of public opinion in the philosophy of Right. 79 00:09:48,400 --> 00:09:56,080 In explaining the persistence of popular superstition, Fredrick had derided instruction in schools and universities. 80 00:09:57,720 --> 00:10:05,130 For his part, Wilhelm moves in a contemporary and a prominent member of The Secret Berlin Wednesday, 81 00:10:05,280 --> 00:10:13,650 Society wondered why prejudice was still widespread across the territory, across the Prussian territory. 82 00:10:14,310 --> 00:10:18,800 That is, despite the celebrated efforts of the monarch himself. 83 00:10:20,230 --> 00:10:30,160 Kant noted in the same spirit that dispelling the prejudices of the masses would prove both complicated and protracted. 84 00:10:31,030 --> 00:10:34,360 It was not a matter for precipitate revolution. 85 00:10:34,960 --> 00:10:39,310 A public account wrote, can achieve enlightenment only slowly. 86 00:10:41,140 --> 00:10:45,459 Mendelsohn can't untangle much like Lessing had, 87 00:10:45,460 --> 00:10:51,790 our Sheila and sister took an interest in the dynamics of enlightenment in the 88 00:10:51,790 --> 00:10:58,880 context of a more of a more general concern with the education of the human race. 89 00:10:58,900 --> 00:11:02,590 So long, long, 90 00:11:02,620 --> 00:11:12,190 long term historical projections they wish that is true contributes to a debate about the intellectual and moral development of the species. 91 00:11:16,020 --> 00:11:27,480 So the terms, vocation, perfectibility and culture were integral to the discussion in the lectures on the philosophy of world history. 92 00:11:27,720 --> 00:11:36,500 Hegel proposed that history itself should be viewed as a kind of accumulated discipline, a sort. 93 00:11:36,720 --> 00:11:48,600 It's his phrase involved the gradual schooling of the human will, whereby natural inclinations were increasingly subject to rationalisation. 94 00:11:49,830 --> 00:11:54,210 Rousseau had termed this capacity the faculty of self perfection. 95 00:11:54,690 --> 00:12:01,500 Central to the experience of discipline for Hegel was precisely the activity of self-discipline. 96 00:12:02,160 --> 00:12:13,350 Raw impulses were perfected that is refined by reflection under the influence of both instrumental and moral reasoning. 97 00:12:14,840 --> 00:12:22,460 Will this activity of cultivation explain to the advance of Hegel's key term spirit? 98 00:12:23,120 --> 00:12:28,730 Geist progressed by means of a progress of on. 99 00:12:29,890 --> 00:12:39,550 Hagel's argument drew indirectly on analysis of the passage from rudeness to refinement formulated in the works of HUME, Smith, Ferguson and Miller. 100 00:12:40,270 --> 00:12:47,799 Yes, his position was clearly informed by the German idealist insight that civilisation was as 101 00:12:47,800 --> 00:12:56,080 much a product of a free self-development as it was an effect of the forces of nature. 102 00:12:58,100 --> 00:13:02,900 This did not mean that humans made their history as a matter of choice. 103 00:13:03,800 --> 00:13:12,260 It meant instead that they cultivated their desires even as they were subject to the effects of their appetites. 104 00:13:14,510 --> 00:13:20,330 This aptitude was the basic building block of civilisation, 105 00:13:20,390 --> 00:13:27,650 distinguishing the uneventful character of animal existence from the ever changing variety of human life. 106 00:13:28,070 --> 00:13:32,600 Fields, cultivated, cities built, technology developed and so on. 107 00:13:33,230 --> 00:13:34,670 As I've already implied. 108 00:13:34,850 --> 00:13:42,410 Whereas building in Hegel generally refer to the process of refinement and cultivation that underlies the development of Geist, 109 00:13:42,980 --> 00:13:49,370 it also had a narrower meaning applicable to society in 17th and 18th century France. 110 00:13:50,030 --> 00:13:55,670 The age of Belgium in this sense was the era of politeness within this epoch. 111 00:13:56,120 --> 00:14:02,360 Rationality and credulity vied for ascendancy. 112 00:14:02,990 --> 00:14:11,660 I turn now to the drama of their competition, the competition between these two dispositions as depicted in Hegel's phenomenology. 113 00:14:12,860 --> 00:14:22,790 So for Hegel, the world of modern biltong is a condition of universal alienation in which mutual dependence thwarts freedom. 114 00:14:23,510 --> 00:14:30,320 Under these conditions, as Hegel presented things, rival approaches to intellectual authority confronted one another. 115 00:14:30,650 --> 00:14:37,160 On one side stood faith Sloper, as I've mentioned on the other insight his term for reason. 116 00:14:37,220 --> 00:14:40,640 But in the original, the phrase is I insist. 117 00:14:42,050 --> 00:14:45,800 Unlike the unhappy consciousness of early Christianity, 118 00:14:46,070 --> 00:14:57,710 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. 119 00:14:59,040 --> 00:15:07,589 Unlike Stoicism, this longing found expression in a flight into a fictional yet imaginatively rich 120 00:15:07,590 --> 00:15:12,990 realm as depicted in the in the lavish religious artworks of early modern Europe. 121 00:15:14,270 --> 00:15:19,700 Despite this wealth in terms of aesthetic representation, the true object of faith. 122 00:15:20,210 --> 00:15:31,940 Thus, to say God remains obscure at once, remote and incomprehensible reason or insight by comparison placed value in the hidden sphere. 123 00:15:32,090 --> 00:15:42,520 It was a secular enterprise. What a prize was, the activity of self-consciousness itself in seeking to eliminate error. 124 00:15:42,760 --> 00:15:46,600 That's what reasoning did. So is how you described it. 125 00:15:46,840 --> 00:15:55,540 Reason operated by means of conceptual differentiation directed against the principles advocated by faith. 126 00:15:57,140 --> 00:16:01,670 It had no content other than the values it rejected. 127 00:16:02,210 --> 00:16:10,130 It undermined, eroded and sabotaged where it was faith aimed at approved standards, 128 00:16:10,130 --> 00:16:17,180 transcending the vanity of this veil of tears inside cherished purity of intention 129 00:16:17,360 --> 00:16:22,400 and opposition to the corrupt practices associated with institutionalised religion. 130 00:16:23,690 --> 00:16:29,750 However, the conflict, the confrontation was marked by mutual misunderstanding, 131 00:16:30,290 --> 00:16:40,670 not least because Reason was determined to downgrade religion without comprehending what gave rise to its characteristic attitudes. 132 00:16:42,310 --> 00:16:49,420 So Hagel stylised presentation well in his stylised presentation rather. 133 00:16:49,600 --> 00:16:54,850 While Faith was initially happy to pursue its own tranquil course. 134 00:16:55,630 --> 00:17:01,720 Inside all reason was motivated to contend with its assumptions. 135 00:17:03,010 --> 00:17:08,050 In this spirit, reason aim to challenge all aspects of religious belief. 136 00:17:09,360 --> 00:17:19,310 Well, first it parodied Christianity's conception of the divinity by equating its idea of God with representational images like crucifixes, 137 00:17:19,350 --> 00:17:23,610 crucifixes and wood or stone or the wafer of the host. 138 00:17:24,610 --> 00:17:31,660 Next, it sought to subvert the grounds of belief, not least by exposing the narratives of biblical revelation. 139 00:17:32,350 --> 00:17:41,720 And finally, reason denounced the ethical implications of faith by undermining all forms of service. 140 00:17:41,740 --> 00:17:49,300 Above all, its attempts to bring about salvation by token gestures like abstinence or charity. 141 00:17:50,920 --> 00:18:00,460 In general, insight castigated religious conviction as a mental figment whilst refusing to examine the sources of its commitments. 142 00:18:01,900 --> 00:18:10,000 The sheer learning Hegel's phrase that informed the Christian religion was left unexplained and unexplored. 143 00:18:11,250 --> 00:18:13,139 Yet, despite their divergence, 144 00:18:13,140 --> 00:18:25,050 insight and faith share two basic tenets of rational procedure enabling reason to get a foothold inside, as it were, the enemy camp. 145 00:18:26,250 --> 00:18:29,940 This was secured by means of publicity and processes. 146 00:18:30,570 --> 00:18:39,060 Philosophy appeals to public opinion over the heads of the ecclesiastical authorities on the power of centralised government. 147 00:18:40,960 --> 00:18:47,590 This critical spirit extended itself by insinuation rather than violence. 148 00:18:48,250 --> 00:18:51,430 As Hegel wrote in a famous passage, which I quote, 149 00:18:51,940 --> 00:19:04,210 The communication of pure insight is comparable to a quiet expansion or the diffusion of, say, a perfume in the resisting atmosphere. 150 00:19:04,660 --> 00:19:09,910 It is a penetrating infection which does not make itself noticeable beforehand. 151 00:19:11,840 --> 00:19:17,390 There was this process of dissemination that Hegel turned termed enlightenment. 152 00:19:18,610 --> 00:19:28,990 He cited Rameau's nephew on the subtle ascent of Christianity as propagated by minister by missionaries in China. 153 00:19:30,030 --> 00:19:33,090 On the back of incremental infiltration. 154 00:19:33,300 --> 00:19:39,390 Suddenly, one fine morning, the old idol crashed to the ground. 155 00:19:39,780 --> 00:19:43,590 In this vein, enlightenment helped trigger revolution. 156 00:19:45,010 --> 00:19:54,220 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. 157 00:19:55,760 --> 00:19:59,390 Enlightenment instead was partly symptomatic. 158 00:20:00,410 --> 00:20:11,390 The roots of the crash is to say of revolution lie deeper in cumulative normative shifts, cultural shifts, as we might say. 159 00:20:11,690 --> 00:20:18,499 Crucial to this process was the passage of society from the culture of honour to the 160 00:20:18,500 --> 00:20:28,640 value of utility from in from interpersonal amour prop to the impersonal market. 161 00:20:29,660 --> 00:20:30,680 In Hegel's mind, 162 00:20:30,890 --> 00:20:44,390 the atheism and deism that came to prominence in the period like it endorsed the ascendancy of utility or utilitarianism or useful reciprocity. 163 00:20:44,960 --> 00:20:54,050 Even Orthodox religion came to base itself on a vision of the world as a garden planted for humanity's benefit. 164 00:20:54,740 --> 00:21:02,990 The bonds of social life, much like the structure of the universe, were presumed to be held together by utilitarian exchange. 165 00:21:05,010 --> 00:21:14,220 This conception became central to enlightenment, which helps to legitimise a form of value that had become begun to establish itself. 166 00:21:15,060 --> 00:21:22,920 Philosophy, Hegel observed, is merely one aspect of a larger, a larger whole, a larger intellectual, social, whole. 167 00:21:23,700 --> 00:21:33,240 At the same time, its role as a determinant of historical change was itself circumstantially variable for the Greeks, as Hegel put it. 168 00:21:33,390 --> 00:21:43,160 Philosophy had come too late. It made its entrance when the substance of Athenian ethical life faced dissolution. 169 00:21:43,190 --> 00:21:49,490 So with the advent of Plato, its culture was already dissolving its practitioners. 170 00:21:49,520 --> 00:21:53,540 Accordingly, as Hegel put it, withdrew from the affairs of the state. 171 00:21:54,800 --> 00:22:02,030 Yet with the Enlightenment philosophy acquired a more directly formative significance and focussed its energy, 172 00:22:02,330 --> 00:22:06,140 at least in France, on social and political renewal. 173 00:22:07,960 --> 00:22:17,050 For this reason, Hegel could argue that the revolution received its first stimulus and Reagan from philosophy. 174 00:22:17,530 --> 00:22:22,900 In an age when thought mattered, enlightenment could prove decisive. 175 00:22:24,910 --> 00:22:31,780 Nonetheless, although philosophy made a difference, it did not determine the shape of the future. 176 00:22:32,080 --> 00:22:40,990 In fact, its impact in France, in the French context, was largely destructive since it misconceived its own function. 177 00:22:41,950 --> 00:22:47,770 It mistook its obstruction from prevailing circumstances for practical leverage. 178 00:22:48,710 --> 00:22:52,130 Philosophy to be effective needs to work with the grain of history. 179 00:22:52,400 --> 00:23:00,290 However, in France, it became a vehicle for angry opposition following its descent into the void. 180 00:23:02,620 --> 00:23:15,400 As we have by now, come to see Hegel's style of argumentation traded in large agglomeration categories like culture, faith and enlightenment. 181 00:23:16,060 --> 00:23:26,200 Yet he perfectly appreciated the more intricate reality that underlay these, in effect, ideal types. 182 00:23:26,980 --> 00:23:34,120 Enlightenment itself was no exception. Inside the generic concept, he often adopted a more specific usage. 183 00:23:34,690 --> 00:23:40,000 In the narrowest sense, he associated along with the popular philosophy. 184 00:23:40,210 --> 00:23:48,580 Popular philosophy. The prospered in Germany between the heyday of populism and the arrival of the mature Immanuel Kant. 185 00:23:49,240 --> 00:24:00,160 Its watchwords were sound, reason and common sense, and its adherents included figures like Java, Theta, Vice Haupt, Eberhardt and Nikolai. 186 00:24:01,730 --> 00:24:06,740 Some of these thinkers directed that far against positive religion. 187 00:24:06,860 --> 00:24:11,900 That's to say, against the tenets of revelation and ecclesiastical structures. 188 00:24:13,160 --> 00:24:18,920 Hegel found aspects of the same critical disposition in Britain and France as well. 189 00:24:19,850 --> 00:24:24,920 Yet how is the impact of insight in all three countries to be different? 190 00:24:26,330 --> 00:24:36,410 In Britain, for instance, not least under Scottish influence, the conclusions of philosophy apparently reinforce the power of custom in human affairs. 191 00:24:36,950 --> 00:24:43,880 The Germans, for their part, took ultimate value to lie in the human faculty of self-consciousness. 192 00:24:44,390 --> 00:24:49,490 However, this did not result in burning rage against the establishment. 193 00:24:49,790 --> 00:24:54,919 Accordingly, according to Hegel, only in France did philosophy now itself, 194 00:24:54,920 --> 00:25:01,880 specifically dubbed Enlightenment, seek to abolish all religious ideas and every reigning institution. 195 00:25:03,780 --> 00:25:08,610 Ultimately, it was the French Enlightenment that rebelled against and I quote Hegel, 196 00:25:08,760 --> 00:25:14,400 the condition of the world as legally established against the Constitution of the state, 197 00:25:14,700 --> 00:25:21,150 the administration of justice, the mode of government, political authority, and likewise against art. 198 00:25:22,300 --> 00:25:27,760 As Hegel described us, in the place of all these tangible structures that emerged, 199 00:25:27,880 --> 00:25:35,110 the consciousness of perfect liberty and the subsection of the phenomenology and absolute freedom and terror. 200 00:25:35,350 --> 00:25:42,640 This consciousness is identified with the concept of the will as formulated in the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 201 00:25:43,650 --> 00:25:50,580 So the Enlightenment in Hegel covered a set of individuals as well as referring to a trans historical process. 202 00:25:51,330 --> 00:25:57,840 This last was the process of rationalisation designated by Rousseau with the term perfectibility. 203 00:25:58,590 --> 00:26:05,730 Among the Scots, this was regarded as an empirical process depicted in terms of the dynamics of refinement. 204 00:26:06,270 --> 00:26:12,600 The process of rationalisation. Hegel had social and intellectual dimensions. 205 00:26:13,470 --> 00:26:17,670 It affected both manners and philosophical attitudes. 206 00:26:18,240 --> 00:26:23,160 In the latter case, it shaped relations between reason and faith. 207 00:26:24,580 --> 00:26:30,480 Demystification confronted more traditional forms of attachment to meaning. 208 00:26:32,210 --> 00:26:43,140 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. 209 00:26:43,550 --> 00:26:44,630 From this point of view, 210 00:26:44,780 --> 00:26:53,210 the Enlightenment was the era in which faith and reason tangled with an intensity that shook the foundations of the Christian churches. 211 00:26:54,500 --> 00:26:59,690 As we have seen, the standoff had different implications different European countries and Germany. 212 00:26:59,870 --> 00:27:04,880 The impact was more cultural than political or better. 213 00:27:05,090 --> 00:27:12,410 It took the form of cultural revision rather than political revolution from Hegel's perspective. 214 00:27:12,740 --> 00:27:18,320 In the longer term, the former win, in fact, proved more consequential than the latter. 215 00:27:19,360 --> 00:27:26,800 Because Hegel regarded cultural change as more profound and durable than transitory political upheavals, 216 00:27:27,460 --> 00:27:33,400 Much of his attention focussed on the intellectual content of his immediate surroundings. 217 00:27:34,860 --> 00:27:41,220 Above all, he sought to evaluate philosophical developments within his own given milieu. 218 00:27:42,740 --> 00:27:46,400 There were two presiding influences to consider. 219 00:27:47,300 --> 00:27:52,940 One was the revival, the revival of and the revolt against Spiritualism. 220 00:27:53,780 --> 00:27:56,960 The other was the fall out from the philosophy of count. 221 00:27:58,050 --> 00:28:03,420 I shall soon turn to the significant significance of Kant in Hegel's story. 222 00:28:03,570 --> 00:28:15,150 But first, let me consider a key individual, a figure key in the Spinoza Revival, the publicist and philosopher Friedrich Jacobi. 223 00:28:17,330 --> 00:28:31,820 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, 224 00:28:32,210 --> 00:28:39,230 in which famously, Jacobi exposed Lessing's allegiance to the tenets of pantheistic belief. 225 00:28:40,620 --> 00:28:49,110 This immediately aroused consternation in Mendelsohn, and it also shook the complacency of the philosophical establishment. 226 00:28:49,890 --> 00:28:56,250 What's Jacobi revealed his own detailed mastery of spin artistic argument. 227 00:28:57,030 --> 00:29:03,390 He also revealed what he saw as its self-contradictory consequences. 228 00:29:04,800 --> 00:29:10,950 Jacoby's challenge amounted to an indictment of a model of enlightenment. 229 00:29:11,490 --> 00:29:17,220 However, importantly, this was not the beginning of a counter enlightenment. 230 00:29:17,520 --> 00:29:20,010 As Avi Licious has eloquently shown, 231 00:29:20,220 --> 00:29:27,660 the polarities that have shaped the historiography of the period are inapplicable when dealing with the primary sources. 232 00:29:28,410 --> 00:29:34,200 As I've been proposing, enlightenment in Hegel's conception meant the search for reasons. 233 00:29:35,380 --> 00:29:41,080 This had implications for the discovery of truth and the adherence to duty. 234 00:29:41,980 --> 00:29:49,900 In other words, it had consequences in the theoretical and the practical spheres in science and morality, as we might say. 235 00:29:50,880 --> 00:29:55,200 The search for reasons meant rejecting the appeal to authority. 236 00:29:56,040 --> 00:30:04,500 A proposition was true because it was rationally justified, not because it was authorised by an institution like a church or a government. 237 00:30:05,670 --> 00:30:06,990 In a similar vein, 238 00:30:07,410 --> 00:30:20,460 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. 239 00:30:22,020 --> 00:30:26,370 Now, Jacobi accepted the authority of reason against superstition. 240 00:30:26,760 --> 00:30:33,810 He never appealed from the tribunal of the human mind to some higher spiritual or political authority. 241 00:30:34,800 --> 00:30:46,590 Nonetheless, Jacobi did examine the destructive consequences that followed from an unmitigated, an unmitigated adherence to rational accounting. 242 00:30:47,640 --> 00:30:53,580 The relentless resort to reason, which, like Hegel, Jacobi termed I insist inside. 243 00:30:53,580 --> 00:31:02,670 I assume that's why Hagel used the phrase and led to a mechanistic analysis of the natural and ethical world. 244 00:31:03,300 --> 00:31:06,720 Everything was conditioned by something else. 245 00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:14,850 Within this construction, there was no room for a personal god or the exercise of individual freedom. 246 00:31:17,610 --> 00:31:28,260 As a result, as Jacobi saw, meaning and value inevitably dissolved and nihilism, his word descended. 247 00:31:29,860 --> 00:31:36,970 In the standard Christian vision. The divinity was a creative mover and an ethical tribunal. 248 00:31:37,450 --> 00:31:41,470 As such, the deity was necessarily unconditioned. 249 00:31:43,030 --> 00:31:55,390 But on the Cartesian spinner, spinner autistic pitcher, the unconditioned could not be known since the world was only accessible via its conditions. 250 00:31:56,290 --> 00:32:03,820 Similarly, freedom of the will was undermined by a metaphysical system that described the universe 251 00:32:04,120 --> 00:32:10,810 as an unbroken causal nexus if everything was a product of antecedent causes. 252 00:32:12,190 --> 00:32:16,340 Then so was every case of human action. 253 00:32:16,360 --> 00:32:22,930 There could be no free action. This meant that cynicism for for Jacobi was, in fact, self-defeating. 254 00:32:23,560 --> 00:32:33,280 It was based on a chain of mathematical certainties about nature, which denied a set of principles that were equally self-evident. 255 00:32:34,660 --> 00:32:43,990 In accepting that the universe was comprehensively conditioned, we had to abandon conspicuous truths like the Godhead and free will. 256 00:32:45,560 --> 00:32:56,150 Since these truths were, in Jacoby's phrase, immediate, or as we might say, self-evident, they were instantly affirmed by belief. 257 00:32:56,960 --> 00:33:02,210 For example, we could not doubt that our own actions belonged to ourselves. 258 00:33:03,140 --> 00:33:05,900 A decision was a product of free choice. 259 00:33:06,350 --> 00:33:15,320 Even though this faculty was not rationally demonstrated, all no human agent could plausibly deny could plausibly deny it to themselves. 260 00:33:17,280 --> 00:33:25,200 It does transpires that what reason had undermined was reasserted as an article of belief or faith. 261 00:33:26,320 --> 00:33:29,920 However, this faith was not the old faith. 262 00:33:31,460 --> 00:33:38,450 It was instead a new species of philosophical belief that replaced the original feeds of the medieval church. 263 00:33:38,780 --> 00:33:42,350 The old faith had involved an obligation to believe. 264 00:33:42,980 --> 00:33:46,910 It entails submission to the tenets pronounced by an accredited authority. 265 00:33:47,330 --> 00:33:53,150 By comparison, Jacobi, Glauber lacked any source of authority outside itself. 266 00:33:54,270 --> 00:34:03,180 Nonetheless, on Jacobean principles, philosophy remains trapped in the antithesis between reason and faith. 267 00:34:03,420 --> 00:34:06,810 It was imprisoned within the dialectic of enlightenment. 268 00:34:08,430 --> 00:34:17,910 Hegel charged Kantian critical philosophy with exactly the same shortcomings as Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. 269 00:34:18,150 --> 00:34:27,600 Sally Sedgwick and others have shown Hegel was substantially motivated as a thinker by the challenge posed by Kantian dualism. 270 00:34:28,620 --> 00:34:35,100 Journalism's, of course, were dialectical contradictions, which were not resolve themselves or could not resolve themselves. 271 00:34:35,550 --> 00:34:40,470 They offered self-defeating solutions to unavoidable dilemmas. 272 00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:45,040 The same as we have seen applied to Huckabee. 273 00:34:45,510 --> 00:34:53,910 His importance for Hagel has certainly been noted by commentators, but his overwhelming significance is perhaps been understated. 274 00:34:54,970 --> 00:35:05,350 From Hagel's viewpoint, the H had offered a Jacobean reckoning with enlightenment, as well as attempts at Kantian Solutions. 275 00:35:06,390 --> 00:35:12,960 But both fell short equally. Both approaches shaped philosophy in the decades that followed. 276 00:35:14,690 --> 00:35:23,150 Jacobi is recourse to faith in immediacy or as I said, self self evidence guided marker on the romantics. 277 00:35:23,600 --> 00:35:32,810 However, just as troubling for Hegel, Kant's difficulties persisted in the 1980s of his successor as above all in the work of Fisher. 278 00:35:34,960 --> 00:35:47,290 As Hegel presented his mature philosophy, Kant had resolved the problem of theoretical scepticism by rendering truth relative to subjectivity. 279 00:35:48,250 --> 00:35:52,570 For Hagel, however, this was simply scepticism in a new guise. 280 00:35:53,290 --> 00:35:59,740 Knowledge was no longer objectively grounded, since it was no more than a construction of human consciousness. 281 00:36:00,280 --> 00:36:04,120 The same fate Hegel went on had befallen Kant's moral theory. 282 00:36:05,260 --> 00:36:09,880 The flaws in his system on Hegel's analysis were diverse and multifaceted. 283 00:36:11,380 --> 00:36:19,210 Hale thought that Kantian ethics was right to locate moral value in the rational faculties of the individual, 284 00:36:19,690 --> 00:36:25,840 though we also believe that Kant had robbed the virtues of any determinate content. 285 00:36:27,080 --> 00:36:32,270 Hegel added the counterpoint moral action of effectiveness and motivation. 286 00:36:34,060 --> 00:36:39,100 To solve this conundrum, Conte resorted to the use of the postulates. 287 00:36:39,820 --> 00:36:48,850 This meant that while it was impossible to reconcile virtue and happiness immediately, one could postulate that ultimate harmony. 288 00:36:49,960 --> 00:36:56,000 But to postulate an outcome, a techno technical term and counting epistemology is I won't go into, 289 00:36:56,020 --> 00:37:01,750 but suffice to say, to postulate an outcome was not to demonstrate its necessity. 290 00:37:02,140 --> 00:37:09,400 Instead it was to. It was to it was to posit a rational ground for belief. 291 00:37:10,300 --> 00:37:18,280 In this way, can system the whole system like Jacoby's came to rest on the edifice of faith. 292 00:37:19,330 --> 00:37:24,610 From Hegel's perspective, the Enlightenment had failed to integrate reason and religion. 293 00:37:25,240 --> 00:37:31,840 He accepted. Along with Jacobi, that reason's insights deprived it of the meaning it sought. 294 00:37:32,800 --> 00:37:41,560 But he further believes that Jacobi in Kant failed to escape this predicament, and in fact, the predicament that created reason demanded faith. 295 00:37:41,710 --> 00:37:43,330 But faith demanded reason. 296 00:37:44,470 --> 00:37:54,400 The philosophy of the 1790s had been unable to accommodate both, thus veering into scepticism, irrationalism and disappointment. 297 00:37:57,720 --> 00:38:01,140 It's a musical. Hinterland. 298 00:38:02,670 --> 00:38:11,220 Overcoming these difficulties was not only important for the sake of surmounting, as it were, cognitive dissonance, dissonance. 299 00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:15,720 It was also essential for the health of modern politics. 300 00:38:17,640 --> 00:38:24,900 As we've come to see the debate about faith and knowledge in the context of the Enlightenment was 301 00:38:24,900 --> 00:38:31,140 at bottom a dispute over the relationship between philosophy and religion viewed more expansively. 302 00:38:32,230 --> 00:38:43,270 This was a multi dimensional contest over the respective jurisdictions of faith, science, morals and politics. 303 00:38:43,900 --> 00:38:51,700 These domains are at least partly correspond to two particular institutions the church, the university and the state. 304 00:38:52,840 --> 00:38:58,240 Carnes had pondered relations between these bodies in the 1780s and nineties. 305 00:38:58,690 --> 00:39:04,150 He argued that church and state dictated the terms of obedience to citizens, 306 00:39:04,630 --> 00:39:09,700 while the philosophical faculties of the university could criticise their assumptions. 307 00:39:09,820 --> 00:39:13,660 In other words, philosophy could scrutinise while government could enforce. 308 00:39:14,970 --> 00:39:22,140 When Hegel addressed the problems bequeathed by the Enlightenment, he was entering into this very controversy. 309 00:39:22,410 --> 00:39:31,200 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, 310 00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:36,450 A moral revolution against the state had taken place beginning in 1789. 311 00:39:36,870 --> 00:39:44,220 Its Rama fine consequences dominated the European scene for the whole of Hegel's adult life. 312 00:39:44,760 --> 00:39:47,310 Second, partly as a consequence of the revolution. 313 00:39:47,760 --> 00:39:57,780 A rep for a representative constitutional regime moved to the centre of political discussion in Germany in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. 314 00:39:58,500 --> 00:40:04,860 Kantian philosophy had largely focussed on the relationship between ethical reform and enlightened monarchy. 315 00:40:05,520 --> 00:40:16,290 By comparison, Hegel's thought came to concentrate on grounding moral opinion in the context of a representative regime. 316 00:40:18,530 --> 00:40:26,550 In the most general terms, Haggard regard religion and politics as serving overlapping objectives. 317 00:40:26,580 --> 00:40:34,610 Though we get into tricky territory here. Each of them was a means of realising what he calls famously the absolute. 318 00:40:35,360 --> 00:40:39,889 This meant that they were charged with advancing supreme value, 319 00:40:39,890 --> 00:40:45,200 which is all the absolute means supreme value, but within a given historical constellation, 320 00:40:46,220 --> 00:40:56,570 what was absolute in cultural life was normativity itself constructed by society over time in pursuit of the desire for freedom. 321 00:40:57,770 --> 00:41:07,550 However, Hegel also noted that religion and politics serve the absolute in vitally distinct ways as far as he was concerned. 322 00:41:07,760 --> 00:41:14,540 Recent conservative polemic in Germany had collapsed both enterprises into a single project, 323 00:41:14,630 --> 00:41:19,820 as if religion should determine the shape and purpose of the state. 324 00:41:20,660 --> 00:41:27,170 But this was to confuse and blend two related but divergent functions. 325 00:41:28,570 --> 00:41:34,990 Hegel feels that reducing politics to religion would have one of two dire consequences. 326 00:41:35,980 --> 00:41:46,780 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. 327 00:41:46,960 --> 00:41:50,110 Interestingly, he thought that's more or less what the French Revolution had been. 328 00:41:50,770 --> 00:41:58,570 Or else it would strive to extinguish individualism in favour of unaccountable authority, a sort of world papacy. 329 00:41:59,440 --> 00:42:05,170 The first essentially was a species of enthusiasm, the second a kind of superstition. 330 00:42:06,580 --> 00:42:15,490 Hagel took up these problems in the context of his theory of the state, beginning at paragraph 257 of the philosophy of right. 331 00:42:17,100 --> 00:42:26,160 I want to focus the concluding portion of this lecture on on the issues that arise in this section of Hegel's text. 332 00:42:26,490 --> 00:42:32,760 The crux of his account of relations between church and state is packed into paragraph 270. 333 00:42:33,030 --> 00:42:42,150 In particular. Ultimately he goes treatment here, branches out into an examination of politics and education. 334 00:42:43,020 --> 00:42:49,170 He indicated that education embraced two poles, the university and the church. 335 00:42:49,740 --> 00:42:51,940 The university, of course, included religion. 336 00:42:52,110 --> 00:43:00,810 Given that theology made up of faculty, but it also embraced science, or more technically, this and Shaft, 337 00:43:00,930 --> 00:43:09,270 which in turn had at least two components physical and speculative science or empirical study and philosophy. 338 00:43:10,440 --> 00:43:20,730 Given the diverse elements constituting religion, science and politics, Hegel endeavoured to figure out the interconnections between these components. 339 00:43:22,330 --> 00:43:31,850 He began by noting that the June nature of modern political rather, he began by noting the dual nature of modern political regimes. 340 00:43:31,870 --> 00:43:43,450 The state he wrote, and I quote, is both a universal interest as such and the conservation of particular interests within the universal interest. 341 00:43:43,540 --> 00:43:51,040 In other words, a constitutional polity of the modern kind heart to serve the general interest. 342 00:43:51,520 --> 00:43:55,270 It was to that extent a collective enterprise. It was the state. 343 00:43:56,050 --> 00:44:04,180 However, at the same time, the modern state was characterised in terms of its enhancement of individual interests. 344 00:44:04,900 --> 00:44:11,640 The contrast here was really with the ancient world. Individual interests expressed themselves in diverse ways. 345 00:44:12,360 --> 00:44:17,160 First, they comprised the sphere of civil society, or, as we might say, economy. 346 00:44:17,760 --> 00:44:23,520 But second, they were often composed, composed into subordinate associations. 347 00:44:23,940 --> 00:44:30,269 Churches offering obvious examples for Hegel religion could operate freely under 348 00:44:30,270 --> 00:44:35,150 the state so long as it did not collide with the state's fundamental values. 349 00:44:36,300 --> 00:44:40,710 The church had its doctrine, and as did the state. 350 00:44:41,520 --> 00:44:47,700 The former had to be reconciled on terms stipulated by the latter. 351 00:44:49,810 --> 00:44:56,020 In the case of irreconcilable doctrines, for example, these are his examples on a baptism. 352 00:44:56,290 --> 00:45:06,060 Quakerism and Judaism. Toleration should be practised and toleration in turn presupposed the robustness of the state. 353 00:45:07,170 --> 00:45:10,319 Both church and state were spiritual enterprises. 354 00:45:10,320 --> 00:45:16,290 For Hagel, a mistake he thought to regard the church as the soul of the Constitution. 355 00:45:16,440 --> 00:45:20,850 While politics was left to deal mechanistic mechanistically with material needs. 356 00:45:23,160 --> 00:45:35,400 Geist for Hagel meant consciousness, and consciousness spawned the human environment inclusive of all ecclesiastical and political establishments. 357 00:45:35,850 --> 00:45:42,480 Moreover, the modern state was not simply a product of consciousness alone, or, as we might say. 358 00:45:42,780 --> 00:45:51,210 It was not only a result of objective struggle, it was also a function of self consciousness. 359 00:45:51,240 --> 00:45:59,940 In other words, the modern state was more than a creature of happenstance and customs. 360 00:46:01,010 --> 00:46:06,980 It was also the outcome of deliberate self awareness in public life. 361 00:46:09,230 --> 00:46:16,100 Given the reality of constitutional design, bureaucratic planning and legislation, 362 00:46:16,190 --> 00:46:24,920 the various branches of the state reflected on their activities in the state, as haggled put it, knows what it wills. 363 00:46:25,790 --> 00:46:30,470 Legislation, for example, is not a matter of merely reflexive behaviour. 364 00:46:30,710 --> 00:46:34,300 It is instead a species of self-conscious action. 365 00:46:34,490 --> 00:46:37,970 It comprises thought, foresight and deliberation. 366 00:46:40,020 --> 00:46:45,360 In addition, the university reflects upon what the state knows. 367 00:46:46,170 --> 00:46:51,180 For Hagel, the university, like the church, was a means to education. 368 00:46:51,180 --> 00:46:53,910 It was, in effect, a form of socialisation. 369 00:46:55,020 --> 00:47:04,770 But he also to the university, regarded both university and church as, as he put it, essentially ends in themselves. 370 00:47:05,770 --> 00:47:11,650 They should not be governed by the state and they should not seek to govern society. 371 00:47:12,190 --> 00:47:16,870 There is a distinction to be drawn between education and administration. 372 00:47:17,260 --> 00:47:20,950 This observation brings me now to my final point. 373 00:47:21,850 --> 00:47:27,669 For Hagel. In the end, science must take the lead in education. 374 00:47:27,670 --> 00:47:31,160 Not this. And shaft. Not. Just physical science. 375 00:47:32,060 --> 00:47:36,950 He thought that religion certainly involved cognition brought about through learning. 376 00:47:37,280 --> 00:47:41,300 However, its precepts were largely symbolic in nature. 377 00:47:42,530 --> 00:47:47,850 True religion enlightens. But it is not sufficient for enlightenment. 378 00:47:49,060 --> 00:47:55,150 As Hagel argued, faith in any liberal regime must be supplemented by knowledge, 379 00:47:55,660 --> 00:48:02,650 But knowledge must crystallised in the modern state was the province of philosophy and not the church, 380 00:48:03,100 --> 00:48:07,360 as resolved by enlightened opinion since the days of Galileo. 381 00:48:08,530 --> 00:48:15,100 In the 19th century, the centrality of knowledge brought politics into a deepening relationship with universities. 382 00:48:15,580 --> 00:48:19,450 Their alliance, of course, might easily descend into conflict. 383 00:48:20,710 --> 00:48:29,110 Equally philosophy might fail to reconcile various academic disciplines pitting, say, the sciences against the humanities. 384 00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:34,120 Such battles grew in intensity in the final quarter of Hegel's life. 385 00:48:35,050 --> 00:48:42,310 Especially during the period of the calls part Greece, the state, religion and the university jostled for position. 386 00:48:43,700 --> 00:48:52,850 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. 387 00:48:53,090 --> 00:48:53,840 Thank you very much.