Caputo argues that for Kant God fulfills a purely “regulative” function, providing the basis for an aesthetic “as if” regarding the divine regulation of the world. God also has a moral function, giving the rational demands of duty a divine, theological umph. Kant’s philosophy and the Enlightenment in general “put God in such a vulnerable position that it was only a matter of time until someone would come along and lop God off, on the grounds that natural science and human ethics, that is, reason, could really get along fine, thank you, without this extra hypothesis, which tended more and more to look like an unnecessary supplement.” The nineteenth century is the
century of pruning, as Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche dispensed with God in various ways. Theologians meanwhile attempted to make the best of a bad situation and retreated into the realm of feeling or declared independence (as Barth does) without explaining exactly how theology might challenge the conceptions of philosophy.

But the Enlightenment died, and it died in part because it overreached n the interests of establishing itself by pure reason. According to Caputo, Hegel made a crucial
qualification to the Enlightenment by introducing the category of history into philosophy. As Caputo puts it, “Hegel insisted against the Enlightenment that the ideas and ideals of ‘pure reason’ have a coefficient in time and history where they are embodied in the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears, of concrete peoples. So Hegel introduced a distinction between what he called Verstand, abstract understanding, and Verunft, the more concrete embrace of a robustly historical reason. Abstract understanding is one-sided, purely formal and ahistorical . . . . Against this, Hegel showed that reason unfolds and develops in time, passing through several forms (Gestaltungen), and that it is realized in different ways, in different times and places.” Instead of the universal call of duty that he found in Kant, morality must “melt into the concrete universality of what he called ethical life (Sittlichkeit), that is, the real rules and rich customs and practices of cultural and soial life in which rational morals are actually embodied.”

Yet, Hegel remained an Enlightenment man, refusing to give up the notion of a comprehensive “system” of rationality: “For Hegel, what unfolds in time and history is a deep rationality or rational principle, what he calls the ‘absolute,’ which works its way out beneath and seeks its goals through the twists and turns that history seems to take on the surface. God writes straight with crooked lines.” Hegel thus perpetuates “pretty much the same ‘totalizing,’ all-encompassing grip of ‘reason,’ now in the form of a historical reason that the Enlightenment had first proposed.”

Hegel, for instance, was able to fit Christianity into the larger, encompassing narrative of reason. Christianity, he said, “is the absolute religion and the absolute truth,” but what he meant that it was “the absolute truth in pictorial form, that it says something very true but that the particular terms in which it is does so are not quite true, are not the whole truth, are not as true as true can be.” Religion’s truth is Vorstellung, a word related to the German word for “representation” as in a painting. The story of the incarnation is thus allegorized (much as Kant had done) into a rational mode: Christmas announces that “God has become immanent in the world and that the world is the unfolding of God’s life in space and time.” Hegel gives this development a (Joachimite) Trinitarian spin: “In the first phase of religion, which Hegel called the religion of the Father, God is taken to be transcendent and wholly other, a distant power, a pure command, not unlike an absolute Eastern monarch; Judaism is his example. In the second phrase, the religion of the Son, God becomes man by becoming a particular man, Jesus, whose empirical particularity has to break up (the Crucifixion), like a seed that must break up in order to germinate. Only then can we enter the final phase, the religion of the Spirit, in which God’s life among us may spread to all, and we all come to understand that history is the unfolding of God’s life in time.” Christian theology is a metaphorical way of talking about this, and Hegel as much as Kant before and Bultmann after is a de-mythologizer.

More recently, the Enlightenment has come under a triple critique. First, there is the “heremeneutical turn.” Heidegger recognizes that “as soon as we come to be we find that we are already there,” and this means “we can never get behind ourselves and see ourselves come into being, or that we never can get out of our skin and look down upon ourselves from above.” We ought not to attempt to re-start a presuppositionless self, in Cartesian fashion, but recognize that our presuppositions “give us our perspective, our angle of entry, enabling us to understand in the first place, giving shape to the way the world presents itself to us here and now.” We all have our angles, but angles don’t distory; “they give us access.” Without an angle, we don’t even know where to begin.

Second, there is a “linguistic turn.” Descartes wrote the Meditations, and found that he was writing. What Descartes failed to put into doubt when he put everything in doubt was language. His title aimed, mystic-like, at a denuded self, a pre-linguistic and naked self, but “everything he said, every last word of it, was deeply embedded in the words he used that he had inherited from the Jesuits, and from the scholastic philosophers before them, and from his mother and father, and from the books he read in school, and so on.” Our words “come equipped with ingrained grooves that will carry you down pre-established routes like a canoe.” Wittgenstein argues there are no private languages, so that as soon as Descartes begins writing, he is “in the middle of a public language. There is no such thing as a pure, private, pre-linguistic sphere.

Finally, there is a “revolutionary turn.” Here, Caputo summarizes the work of Thomas Kuhn on scientific languages. Scientists, Kuhn argued, are not “pure bloodless observers recording information like automated information gathering systems; they are flesh and blood people with hunches, intuitions, and strong feelings. They do not passively record but actively project.” And scientific revolutions do not turn so much on new data as on new configurations of data. Anomalies from the previous system nag until someone proposes a new theory that reorganizes the data and offers and new paradigm. Normal science is undertaken along the path of paradigms, and this shapes the experiments that are done.