Insight and the Enlightenment: WhyEinsichtin Chapter Six of Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit?

Abstract

AbstractHegel uses the termEinsicht(‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of thePhenomenology of Spirit(notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in thePhenomenologyas simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from thePantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. TheAufklärungprovenance ofEinsichtshows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference toEinsichtin theVorbegriffof theEncyclopaedia Logicconfirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science.