Hösle's Dialectic - Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and the Failure of Both
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Starting Point: Modernity’s Legitimation Problem
Modernity—understood as the project of the Enlightenment—rests on the emancipation of reason from all external authorities. Neither tradition nor religion nor political power is to hold sway unquestioned any longer. What is legitimate must be able to prove itself through rational justification. This demand was revolutionary—and it was productive. It made possible science, human rights, democracy, technological progress.
But this emancipation created a fundamental problem that Vittorio Hösle has diagnosed with precision: the Enlightenment cannot justify its own normative foundations.[1] If everything is to be subjected to critique—where then do we get the criteria of critique? If no authority may hold sway unquestioned any longer—how then do we justify the authority of reason itself?
This legitimation problem is not merely theoretical. It manifests practically in three phenomena:
First: the uprooting of individuals. The dissolution of traditional bonds (family, estate, church, local community) led to the atomization of society. The individual gained freedom—but lost footing. Modern mass society produced loneliness, disorientation, loss of meaning. This diagnosis was not wrong—the dissolution of traditional bonds was indeed a real process of modernization.
Second: the rule of the instrumental. Enlightened rationality increasingly proved to be purposive rationality—a calculus of means for given ends. But where do the ends themselves come from? Modernity could solve technical-economic problems, but could not justify substantive values. Max Weber’s diagnosis of the “disenchantment of the world” captured this in a concept.[2]
Third: the crisis of institutions. If all institutions are legitimated only by functional efficiency, they lose their normative binding force. Why should I obey laws? Why keep contracts? Why bind myself to promises? The Enlightenment could not convincingly answer these questions—because it no longer knew any unquestionable values.
Counter-Enlightenment as Necessary Reaction—and as Wrong Path
The counter-Enlightenment arose as a reaction to this crisis. It was not merely reactionary, not merely irrational—it had a legitimate intuition: the abstract reason of the Enlightenment had lost, overlooked, destroyed something essential. It had lost sight of the concrete conditions of human life.
Hösle identifies three forms of counter-Enlightenment, all of which fail on a performative contradiction—they want to step reflectively out of reflection:[3]
a) Traditionalism - The Return to Origins
Thesis: Modernity is decline. We must return to premodern orders—to the authority of the church, the monarch, the estate hierarchy, the patriarchal family.
Representatives: Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Carl Ludwig von Haller, Donoso Cortés, later the “Conservative Revolution” (Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck).
Legitimate insight: Traditions are not merely irrational remnants. They contain sedimented experience, tried-and-tested solutions, identity-forming narratives. Their radical destruction leads to disorientation.
The contradiction: Traditionalism wants to step reflectively out of reflection. It recognizes modernity as a problem—but this recognition is itself already modern. One can no longer live naively in traditions once one has recognized their contingency. The attempt to restore tradition already presupposes its being called into question—a performative contradiction.[4]
b) Existentialism - The Flight into Immediacy
Thesis: Reflection destroys life. We must return to immediacy—to feeling, to intuition, to existential decision, to authentic experience.
Representatives: Romanticism (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Bergson, later existentialism (Sartre, Camus), dialectical theology (Barth).
Legitimate insight: Not everything can be mediated conceptually without remainder. There are dimensions of experience—aesthetic, erotic, religious, existential—that elude rational discourse. Philosophy of life grasped the “resistance of experience” to its complete rationalization.
The contradiction: Existentialism, too, wants to reach thinkingly what precedes thought. It criticizes reflection—but this critique is itself reflection. It demands the “leap” beyond mediation—but this demand is mediated through language, argumentation, tradition. The immediacy it seeks is always already structured by mediation—a performative contradiction.[5]
c) Instrumentalization - Values as Means of Power
Thesis: There are no objective values. Values are instruments for the enforcement of interests. The task is not to justify values but to deploy them strategically.
Representatives: Nietzsche (on a certain reading), Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, “heroic nihilism,” the Action Française.
Legitimate insight: Values are indeed often instrumentalized. Universal human rights served to legitimize colonial conquests. Democracy was used to justify imperial wars. Genealogical critique (Nietzsche, Foucault) reveals the power dimension of normative discourses.
The contradiction: Instrumentalization sublates itself. If all values are merely instruments of power, this applies to this very thesis itself. Then it too is merely an expression of a will to power—and no longer has any claim to truth. The position is self-refuting. Moreover: whoever no longer believes in religion and tradition but merely finds them “useful” hollows them out. Cynical instrumentalization destroys what it purports to preserve.[6]
Fascism as the Most Radical Form of Counter-Enlightenment
Fascism—and particularly National Socialism—synthesized all three forms of counter-Enlightenment in their most radical manner:
From traditionalism it took over the longing for organic community, for unquestionable hierarchies, for mythical rootedness. But it did not want to restore these—it wanted to create them anew—through the “Volksgemeinschaft” (people’s community), through the “Movement,” through revolutionary mobilization.
From existentialism it took over the privileging of the irrational—feeling against intellect, myth against history, intuition against reflection, “healthy popular sentiment” against “corrosive critique.”
From instrumentalization it took over the devaluation of all values: there was no objective truth, only “Jewish physics” versus “German physics,” no universal morality, only racial morality, no law, only the will of the Führer. Values were tools in the struggle for power and survival.
The synthesis was murderous. Fascism combined:
- Traditionalist rhetoric (Volk, blood, soil, honor) with the most modern technology (industrial annihilation)
- Existentialist authenticity (the “leap,” the “decision”) with bureaucratic rationality
- Instrumental devaluation of all values with fanatical conviction of its own mission
Hösle’s judgment is devastating: “Instead of halting the decay of values and institutions, the counter-Enlightenment drove it forward to an extent of which the Enlightenment would not have been capable.”[7]
Fascism was supposed to save modernity—and destroyed its last remnants. It was supposed to create community—and created totalitarian rule. It was supposed to defend values—and annihilated every normative foundation. It was the “self-destruction of the critique of reason.”
Hösle, “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., pp. 147-152. ↩︎
Max Weber: “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (1917/1919), in: idem: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen: Mohr, 1922, pp. 524-555. Weber speaks of the “disenchantment of the world” as a consequence of the rationalization of all spheres of life. ↩︎
Hösle systematically distinguishes these three forms in “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., pp. 152-162. ↩︎
Hösle, “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., p. 153: “Traditionalism wants to step reflectively out of reflection—a performative contradiction.” ↩︎
Hösle, “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., pp. 154-156. ↩︎
Hösle, “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., pp. 158-160. Hösle shows that nihilism is self-refuting: whoever claims there is no truth is themselves raising a claim to truth. ↩︎
Hösle, “Moralische Reflexion,” op. cit., p. 162. ↩︎