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Hegel’s depiction of the difference between German philosophy and French enlightenment—the difference between the Aufklärung (self-understood as reason’s own self-clarification or explication) and the lumières (selfmisunderstood as reason’s illumination of a..superstitious other)— might be understood as the difference between mourning and melancholia.
REBECCA COMAY
Having already overcome the abstract antinomy of faith and insight, Protestant Germany promises the reciprocal accommodation of religion and reason through its culture of spiritual freedom, and ultimately (or so the Philosophy of Right will eventually argue) through the Prussian state apparatus
'Memory alone then preserves the dead form of the Spirit’s shape as a vanished history [vergangene Geschichte], vanished one knows not how. And the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for admiration has in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin. (545)' I will return to this ‘‘dead form’’ of a superstition cast off or abjected ‘‘one knows not how’’ and just what is at stake in this unknowing. Hegel has just explicitly identified enlightenment as melancholia.
REBECCA COMAY citing HEGEL
Hegel has here just sketched the defensive apparatus of a subject bent on sustaining itself on what it gives up. The constitutive melancholia afflicting insight condemns it to disown the violence it perpetrates on a faith whose grief is matched only by insight’s own manic jubilation: enlightenment fails to register faith’s losses as, in truth, its very own.
Hegel repeatedly uses Freud’s terminology throughout this section of the Phenomenology: disavowal or Verleugnung—even perversion (Verkehrung)— characterizes insight’s relationship to what it assaults. Splitting, isolation, the stubborn forgetting of the lost object
For Kant, a moral revolution would suspend, preempt, and ultimately absorb revolution thus rendering it consistent with the requirements of continuous reform.
