The Enlightenment has turned different faces to those who have
sought to demonstrate its significance for contemporary politics
and philosophy. Some would call it the seedbed of all that is best
in modern Western civilization: human rights, toleration, popular
sovereignty, and the idea of progress. Others have glimpsed a
darker side, stressing its celebration of "instrumental" reason,
mechanistic determinism, hostility to religion, and political
"atomism."
Lewis Hinchman discerns in Hegel the first major philosopher to
have appreciated the ambiguous nature of the Enlightenment and to
have undertaken a systematic inquiry into its origins and
sociopolitical implications. Hinchman is sympathetic toward Hegel's
philosophical approach, seeing in it anticipations of (even
improvements on) influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century
critiques on empiricism and liberalism. On the other hand, he does
take Hegel to task in cases where Hegel appears to stray from his
own program and principles (most notably in the philosophy of
right).
Hinchman's approach to Hegel will appeal to a wide range of
readers, including political scientists, intellectual historians,
and students of comparative and nineteenth-century German
literature, as well as philosophers interested in the history of
their own discipline. He brings together for comparison texts and
passages that are frequently studied in isolation from each other
by scholars in diverse fields.
The burden of Hinchman's argument falls upon his reconstruction
of Hegel's concept of the self. He shows how Hegel partly adopts
ideas of the self that were longstanding among Enlightenment
philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, and Fichte, and partly
develops a novel conception in response to inadequacies in his
predecessors' theories. Hinchman contends that Hegel is the first
philosopher to work out a truly nonsubstantialist idea of the self,
one that does not "reify" this most elusive of human activities. He
then demonstrates that implications of this conception of the self
when one applies it as Hegel did to a critique of the
Enlightenment's epistemology and sociopolitical practice.
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