Scheidell 1

Stephen Scheidell
Enlightenment Modernity and its Discontents
30 September 2009
Enlightenment Anthropology II:
Social Structures According to Hamann, Rehberg, and Hegel
The last paper explored the underlying anthropological
assumptions behind how certain enlightenment thinkers handled the
role of reason for the individual. This paper will focus more attention on
the second of the underlying questionsthat concerning the
placement and relation of the individual in society by exploring the
perceived disconnect between the two in Hamann and Rehberg. To
conclude, we will evaluate Hegel's solution to liberalism's alienation of
the individual. As we will demonstrate, all three thinkers base their
critique of liberalism in their respective ontological views of humanity.
Each demonstrates in a unique fashion how and why an enlightened
society self-destructs by imposing the "universal" upon the individual.
Hamann began by attacking a fundamental belief of
enlightenment liberalismhuman autonomywhen he claimed, "We
are bound with other things."1 Hamann proceeded to explicate the full
implications of such an immediate dependence. First, he rejected any
notion of isolated reason arriving at truth; instead, truth is a sprit who
"the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows
him."2 Via such a biblical reference, Hamann made abundantly clear
upon whom we are dependent for truth. Furthermore, he expanded this
dependence against the motives behind enlightenment notions of
autonomy and freedom when he asked, "Why does trade increase the
love of freedom? We love what we own. Freedom is therefore
nothing but one's own profit."3 By these and similar claims, he thereby
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Fragments, 167
Golgotha and Schlebimini, 232
Fragments, 162

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established an inextricable link between both the individual and God
and between the individual and social others. Hamann contends that
these links constitute very essential elements of one's own structure.
"God and neighbor are therefore a part of my self-knowledge, my selflove."4 He thus fully integrates interdependence with one's self-identity.
While Hamann may not always appear as a "systematic" thinker,
his thought demonstrates a strong coherence. His fundamental
understanding of the human condition spills over into his thoughts on
how the individual operates in a social context. While the enlightened
liberals want to argue for being born into a "state of nature," Hamann
sees individuals as born into a state of dependence, in which they
remain. Such a fundamental disagreement emanates into colliding
images of a flourishing society. The liberals establish individuals as
autonomous, thereby creating a conflict between individual interests
and state interests. Hamann, in contrast, will deny just that autonomy
and thus show that societal well-being and individual well-being collide
only in the imaginations of the "objective" scientists of statecraft.
Hamann proceeded primarily on theological grounds, while
Rehberg and Hegel critiqued enlightenment modernity on logical and
metaphysical lines respectively. Rehberg disrupted the coherence of a
rational society from inside out through a Humean skepticism. Hegel
bridged the disconnect created by autonomous individualism by
treating Reason as the power of unification, which unites the particular
to the universal and thus the individual to the state. While these two,
along with Hamann, see humanity as socially dependent, their
analyses of the problem follow very different courses, for they work
with rather different conceptions of reason.
Rehberg worked "within the bounds of reason alone" and thereby
found that very resource wanting for a moral guide. He primarily wrote
against Kant's Second Critique to demonstrate this point. Rather than
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Fragments, 165

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trailing through the arguments, as we did with Hamann, let us proceed
to evaluate the claims made by Rehbergespecially that "there is an
unbridgeable gap between the universal and the particular." 5 While
superficially this is more metaphysical than anthropological, we can
still see a hint of Rehberg's idea of humanity. Our reason, guided by
universal concepts, cannot provide a rubric robust enough to trail all
the way from universal concepts to particular situations. In fact, one
might follow his logic to say, there are too many universals and too
many differing contexts to decide coherently when and where which
universal principle is to be enacted. Reason is therefore necessary, but
not sufficient, to establish a moral guide. At this impasse, one's
personal and cultural histories step in to fill the gaps. Rehberg's vision
of a rational society therefore can only be rational up to a certain point,
at which it must admit and recognize its dependence upon ancestral
history.
Hegel, contra Rehberg, took on the challenge of bridging the
universal and the particular. He does so by defining reason as Reason,
the power of unification.6 Reason, thus re-imagined, dialectically moves
from Thesis to Antithesis toward a higher unitythe Synthesis, which
becomes a new Thesis and restarts the cycle of ever-self-refining
Reason. The conflict between universal (Thesis) and particular
(Antithesis) exemplifies one such dialectical movement. Now, for
Hegel, the universal and the particular have physical counterparts: the
State as universal and the human individual as the particular.

This

metaphysical model brings his anthropology to the fore. The individual

struggles in personal conscience against the prevailing ethic of the
Statea dichotomy explicit in individualistic liberal societies.
Meanwhile, the State struggles to guide the ethic of its citizens. The
unifying power, Reason, works upon the State as a whole, leading State
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 306
Habermas, 23

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and citizen toward a moral unity, resulting in a morally conscious State
that already embodies the private moral impulse of the citizens. This
may strike as philosophical abstraction, but one sees here a developed
metaphysics of Rehbergs thesisReason and history coinciding to
create the moral fabric of a society.
We therefore see Rehberg, Hamann, and Hegel coming from
different stances to argue toward strikingly similar conclusions. All
three recognize interdependence between humanity and its
surroundings. All three also see history as playing a vital role in moral
guidance.7 All three thinkers, although using clearly differing trains of
logic, reject liberalism's apathy toward history and its affirmations of
human autonomy.

We do not see it explicitly in Hamann, for he takes a theological route. Nevertheless,

if one accepts the idea that God's self-revelation manifests historically, one can see
Hamann's implicit, indirect affirmation of history.
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