Hegel and the Mendelssohn family: On Berlin Enlightenment in the Age of Restauration

International audienceWas heisst aufklären? What is Enlightenment? When Hegel took over from Fichte at the University of Berlin, the time of the Aufklärung gave way to that of the Restoration in its various political, social and religious forms, and philosophy reflects this in its thinking. However, an enlightened subculture also survived in the 1820s, which later came to light with the radical Aufklärung of young Hegelianism. The Mendelssohn family depicts the different variants of emancipation in a post-enlightened society, where the question of religious confession is played out between tradition, reformation, conversion and atheism. The generations newly converted to Christianity were anxious to give contemporaries and posterity the image of a large, pious, Christian and German bourgeois family, at the risk of masking their essential contribution to the continuation of the "philosophical" movement of the Aufklärung, to the constitution of a progressive and cosmopolitan Berlin political consciousness and to new configurations of Jewish identity and enlightened humanity. Hegel's relationship to the Mendelssohn family spans three generations, which also define three distinct modes in the problematic of the continuation or reversal of the Aufklärung project from both theoretical and practical points of view: I) the relationship to Moses, the late patriarch, who represents the legacy of the historical Aufklärung; II) the relationship to Joseph and Abraham, the children of Moses, who belong like Hegel to the generation that lived through the French Revolution; III) the relationship to Felix and Fanny, the grandchildren of Moses, the generation of Hegel's pupils who were educated at the time of the Restoration