Thursday, January 08, 2004
(8:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
243 Pages to Absolute Knowledge
Some time this evening, I hit that watershed point, or, if you preferred, I crossed my own Hegelian Rubicon. I am now over one half of the way through Hegel's monumental Phenomenology of Spirit and thus more than half way to the elusive goal of absolute knowledge.
I am, if I must be completely honest, at a low point in my enthusiasm for this project -- it has definitely turned into a slog. Previously, the familiar Hegelian catch-phrases kept my interest. The preface and intro are essential reading for everyone, and the latter is actually fairly accessible. The sections on sense-perception sometimes lost me, but it was all working up to the essential Hegelian motherlode, the Master-Slave Dialectic. I had already read and underlined in that section before beginning this project, and going over that familiar territory was exactly what I needed to maintain momentum. The next section, culminating in the analysis of the unhappy consciousness, was in many ways just as interesting (the entire section on "Self-Consciousness" is fairly cool, from a certain dorky point of view). The next signpost was provided by Slavoj Zizek -- I waited with breathless anticipation for the infinite judgment: "Spirit is a bone." When I got there, it was every bit as good as I had expected.
Now, however, I am 50 pages past phrenology and another 150 away from the Beautiful Soul. I have nothing to look forward to from here to there. I could take a break and read some Kojeve, which I think counts as reading Hegel, but I somewhat arbitrarily decided that since the first section of his book is a summary of the first six chapters of the Phenomenology, I would not indulge in Kojeve until I had done my homework.
Anyway, that's the story of my reading. I apologize for the sheer boringness, and I will now add my thoughts on Hegel. First, I am surprised by the way that it seems to read as a succession of distinct characters: the master, the slave, the skeptic, the stoic, the scientist, the libertine, etc. It's couched in some idiosyncratic philosophical jargon, but a lot of it contains some genuine insight into the human condition -- as though Hegel had known, or had even been, people in each of these successive categories. In this regard, Hegel seems to be a less aesthetically pleasing Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard's decision to write pseudonymously when he needed to use the "highest" perspective of his scheme (Anti-Climacus) takes on a new significance. Whereas Hegel continuously makes asides from the perspective of absolute knowledge ("this guy thinks things are like this, but I can see this..."), Kierkegaard completely loses himself in the subject-positions of his authors. This gives Constantine Constantius and Johannes Climacus a certain vividness that the unhappy consciousness simply does not have. At the same time, I wonder whether Kierkegaard is really being honest, because all his pseudonyms do seem to have time bombs planted within their works, which will eventually go off and thus bring to light Kierkegaard's "official" viewpoint.
To do another comparison, Hegel's insistence that the thing-as-such is always already an object of consciousness, or that consciousness is always already among the things, is very similar to Heidegger, especially the early Heidegger of Being and Time. Hegel's insistence that words can be adequate to what they describe is strongly reminiscent of Heidegger's famous catch-phrase, "Language is the house of Being." There are many instances in the Phenomenology that are equally reminiscent of Heidegger's idea of empty chatter (not exact wording here) and Saussure's notion of the signifier (this comparison is especially interesting to me since this Hegel project is partly preparation for a seminar on Derrida next semester, which for me doesn't start until February! BWA-HA-HA!). I've heard that Heidegger's book on Hegel is one of his weaker ones, but it still might be interesting, once I've put Kojeve under my belt.
I will keep you, my gentle readers, up-to-date on all further progress I make toward absolute knowledge. (Already, though, I am starting to get the idea that absolute knowledge isn't going to turn out to be quite what it sounds like.)
