Enlightenment

II. Enlightenment (§538-581)

Hegel explores the opposition of faith, as he has described it in the previous section (below), and pure insight, which at this point I would describe as rationality, or something akin to what we might today imagine as perfectly scientific thinking. This is possibly way off.

Enlightenment, as the goal of pure insight, is opposed to faith, the house of beliefs (esp. religious). What enlightenment opposes seems to be dogmatism and superstition, but at root this is mostly the fault of the power-hungry human failings of the priestly class. Faith is in turn opposed to enlightenment, since it seeks an all too-easy, undialectical (non-fluctuating) truth. I'd say of all the opposites, Hegel is harsher in his critique of enlightenment than he generally is, perhaps exposing some religious defensiveness himself. A rather pleasing summary of Hegel's religious leanings and defense are summarized well by Findlay:

549. The object of religion is rightly declared by enlightenment to be a product of the religious man’s thought, but it is wrongly supposed that this means that this object is a mere fabrication. The religious man’s trust in God is a recognition of the identity of God with his own rational being. The worship of the religious community is likewise something in which God comes to be as the spirit of that community, and does not remain blandly beyond it.

The remainder of the Enlightenment sections are spent trying to resolve the fight between faith and pure insight. The Spirit is again left in a situation of flux between the two, unable to reconcile the abstract Supreme and the concrete, this time on a cosmic level.