Notes On Phenomenology

78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein I.
to transcribe
1. 4/19/94 beginning 2. absolute freedom [6-0:30:00]
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II. general
1. The goal is pure self-recognition (Kants unity of apperception) in Absolute Otherness (things in themselves). 2. If destiny is what awaits to be discovered then the nonidenticalcontent, the objectis destiny-fate. Yet the nonidentical, as what is left out not indifferently, is (as residual category of the causal?) causal. Hence the causality of fate.
III. 3/15/94 A. introduction to the course

1. At the present moment, all the modern projects of philosophy and theory have simply dried up: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, analytic philosophy. As paradigms, theyre simply unavailable. We feel that we cant simply settle with any one of them. We feel that we have to, as it were, look across the board. 2. In all of this Modern philosophy is either the avoidance or acceptance or appropriation of Hegel. (Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, Lyotard) a) Modern philosophy must be a misprision of Hegel. 3. Antigone is the center of the book. 4. five fundamental predicates in Bernsteins reading a) Tragedy: Everyone reads the Phenomenology as a Divine Comedy. Go to Greek tragedy for model. Thesis: (outrageous) tragedy only becomes possible with modernity. b) Transgression: not closure (end of History). Again Antigone, the civil disobedient. Like Hegels other two heroes Jesus and Socrates. Negativity: Is negativity preserved in the Phenomenology? c) [1-0:07:00] Mourning: Is the question of memory separable from the work of mourning (anamnestic solidarity)? Is the Phenomenology a work of mourning? The Phenomenology is about memory, remembering and comprehending history. d) Turning: (conversion, transfigurationErfahrung) Did experience stop in 1807? e) failure of knowledge, disappointment of knowledge. Knowledge, philosophical knowing promised so much. It promised to give us the world and tell us what to do and how to live. The Phenomenology is about the failure of that dream. Its about a disappointment with knowledge. That despite all our knowledge, philosophy cant tell us how to live our lives. Philosophy cant deliver like that. 5. Trying to renew the claims of first generation critical theory. Theres no gap at all between Hegel and Adorno. Adorno knew that, but he knew you couldnt just repeat Hegel. All the fundamental paradigms (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, analytic philosophy) that we have in dealing with modernity divide into two. There are two basic problems that were worried about: a) the problem of domination; justice (how to avoid domination); liberalism, Marxism, some feminisms. (1) Rawls is boring, but just. But he has no notion of why anyone would care about meaning. Just addresses himself to other good liberals. Ignores a world that eats meaning. b) nihilism. (1) The problem that the world becomes disenchanted, that ethical norms and values no longer motivate us. (2) Nietzscheans are brilliant on the question of meaning, but they have problems with the question of justice. Heidegger, for example, is an abject failure.
78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein
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6. How are these two connected? Critical theory is the only one to take both questions seriously. Even the discourses about meaning become part of the culture industry. The problems of nihilism and justice need to be thought simultaneously. 7. Phenomenology is the structural attempt to vindicate the aestheticized vision of fate. Causality of fate. This is the heart of critical theory.
B. Early Theological Writings: The Spirit of Christianity

1. poses Christian love against Judaic law. Mosaic legalism = Kantian moral theory. Legalism is nihilistic. 2. Same with Genealogy of Morals. 3. Duality between Law and Life (so Hegel is vitalist). 4. Kantianism is the highest, most modern form of Platonism. Some say, then, that Hegel is the Aristotelian critique of Platonic Kant. 5. (ETW 185) Abraham figured as leaving to become an overlord to himself. totally without coercion, loss, or mourning. 6. (187) Abraham regarded the whole world as his opposite. (cf Phenomenology 374-383 on Kant). Mastery is bought at the expense of my being a condition of possibility of the natural world. Im outta nature. 7. (191) Mosaic law is produced as the guarantor of the Jews distance from the natural world. a) Subject object dualism has its genealogy in Mosaic law. b) Nothing particular can be rational, so the law (universal, God) must be opposed to everything particular. Deep Western Platonic bias. c) In place of God, we place the Law. => A Jew can be atheistic. 8. (195) Doing nothing on Sabbath is slavish. 9. (199) Setting Law against Life is the Jewish abjection. => Jewish misery is a result of the lifedenying Law theyve installed. 10. (204) The great tragedy of the Jews isnt Greek: cant arouse terror or pity since its not the slip of a beautiful character. Only horror. a) MacbethTrauerspiel (melancholy), not tragedy. b) Everything turns on a stepping out of nature, creating absolute oughts. 11. (211) positivity only partially removed. 12. (215) Hegel is interested in how lave and law are synthesized. 13. I dont need to be told to do whats shareable since thats my desire. 14. Nancys Inoperative Community: love is that which is not self-love. 15. Love is always reaching toward a completion. 16. (96) Love re-presents I to itself broken. 17. #26 Hegel says the same thing: goal of the Phenomenology is (pure self-recognition) in (Absolute otherness) = (Kants transcendental unity of apperception) in (things in themselves). Its a Kantian joke.
C. Kants Moral Theory

a) What makes a good will good unconditionally, absolutely? Not what it wills or consequences, but how it wills. Must be universalizable (so its a separation from my self and body.) b) Hegels critique of Kant is that Kants moral law ultimately depends on a facticity of whats moral. c) How are things knowable? (1) Must be in space and time. (2) Must be connectable (via causality) with everything else. [this implies a logic of connection, systematization.] (3) The form of the world comes from us and forms of intuition, causality, reciprocity, substance are necessary.
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(4) We cant know the world as it is in itself. => Kant is the first philosopher of finitude. Its a world of appearance. (5) But the transcendental self that knows is not part of the known world.
IV. 3/17/94 A. [1-1:15:00] preliminary

1. re: Causality of fate a) immanent and self-grounding normativity. The claim of the other emerges as fate. b) Justice only appears retrospectively, not a priori. Only with a causality of fate can we have an account of the logics of justice and the logics of meaning. c) If one operates in a Kantian manner, one denies life. d) The activity of fate is the renewal of culture. 2. Habermass Freud chapters: systematically distorted communication is like return of the repressed. Cf. Bernsteins Self- Knowledge in Lash. 3. All modern philosophy fails to handle law and nihilism simultaneously. a) Early Marx knew this. Marx has been dirempted into liberal (Habermas, even Rawls), romantic (Habermass reading of Adorno, Castoriadis). 4. Habermas depends on agreeing with Hegel that the Early Theological Writings wont work. 5. Modern society is built on needs (Gesellschaft) of self-directed, autonomous individuals. Hegel wanted to link his ethical vision to his new view of civil society. 6. Love is suspect in Hegel because the complete immanence of self in other is the erasure of self. Cf. fragment in Early Theological Writings. 7. How can you make the immanence of self in other real? a) Pure immanence of meaning in community being complete in a moment is modeled after romantic love and is fascistic. b) Hegel knows this, so it cant be the right account of later Hegel.
B. Recognition
1. Recognition is a combination of love and strife, recognition and misrecognition, negativity. 2. Two levels: intersubjective (you and me), social (Spirit: institutions, practices) 3. Spirit has two levels (love and life become Spirit in these forms) a) only self-consciously normative customs and practices which recognize the need for authority. Essence is only essence for someone; authority. b) societies need to affirm those practices. Absolute Spirit: Art, religion, philosophy. 4. Pluralistic societies cant have univocal symbols, hence the end of Art and the need for philosophy.
C. Early Theological Writings: The Spirit of Christianity

1. (231) 1) Is there an empirical experience of fate? 2. (230) 2) In a culture in which law is inevitable, how do we recover a notion of the law? a) [1-1:3035] Postmodern theology seems to me to be like transcendental communitarianism (Derrida): its the image of the disappearance of law. But we must find a place in our accounting for the permanence of law, of division or diremption, else we get caught up with a desire for immanence (fascistic, romantic love), even if that desire is infinitely deferred; Derrida becomes an infinitely deferred fascism. 3. (231) 3) The act of judgment points to a whole to which youre always in a relation, despite the (Hlderlinian) claim that diremption is constitutive. a) How can this logic be applied to a formation for which the notion of diremption is permanent? b) We have to affirm somehow the loss of unity as constitutive. But a mediated unity is a mediated fascism. c) All recognition is misrecognition. Claim: For Hegel, the goal is not immanence (so not fascistic). Recover individuality, but how do we distinguish ersatz individualities (i.e.
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capitalism)? There must be some absolute negativity thats the monitor of this space of nonreconciliation. 4. [1-1:39:00] (232-233) (the guilt of innocence quote) Youre responsible regardless of intention. anti-liberal. 5. You are in debt to the community for the possibilities of your action, so your very self, even in its transgressive behavior, is grounded in what youre acting against. Therefore we need an explication of the self that is grounded in this notion of collectivity. There is something childish about the superego, since thats a Kantian notion. 6. We can have a logic of guilt and responsibility thats non-Kantian, that has no notion of the internalization of authority, an accepting of collectve norms. We want a notion of ethicality thats not moralistic. No superego, no Name of the Father. (Guilt over Vietnam autobiography). a) You only become an individual through diremption, through action, i.e., when you transgress [Negativity]. How can we generate a conception of action based on this model of transgression and criminality. b) How can we theorize action in the context of this logic of subjection as transgression? How can we build a notion of transgression thats not Bataillean, but more micro? c) Need to generalize transgression into a theory of action and behavior.
D. preliminary to Phenomenology [1-1:44:00]

1. Differenzschrift a) [1-1:46:39] Let me just very briefly give you external reasons for doubting that Hegel intended a presuppositionless starting point. Firstly, Hegel, from the time of his Differenzschrift thats called the difference between the Fichtean and the Schellingean philosophiesargued that all philosophy was historical, that all philosophy was therefore conditioned, and that all philosophy was a product of its own time and therefore socially mediated. Of course, Hegel didnt think that that entailed that philosophy becomes a sociology of knowledge. Thats the problem: how can we admit all those things and not collapse into the sociology of knowledge thats the project. He argues further that philosophy must always be double. Firstly, he says, philosophy only exists as a response to diremption. The famous section of the Differenzschrift is called The Need of /for philosophy. Its both philosophys need and why philosophy is needed. The answer is that philosophy only comes on the scene when a culture is in trouble, when it suffers from various fundamental fractures and diremptions. Therefore philosophy is always the attempt, and I think of tis as beginning with Plato: I read Plato as a good American philosopher. That is, I read Plato as dealing with the problem of multiculturalism. Because Greece as a port, the Piraeuswhy does The Republic take place in the Piraeus? If begins cataba, I went down, thats of course the descent into hell by the way. Cataba is the phrase from Homer, I went down into Hades. Why is the Piraeus hell? Because it was a sea port were ships from all different nations came together, and therefore we had many gods. And its the many godsthis is the Straussian readingthat problematized the Homeric encyclopedia, that problematized the possibility of a unified view. So Plato is responding to just the sort of problems we are responding to, in a multicultural many-goded world. So philosophy begins at the moment unity disappears. All unity is illusory, thats irrelevant. At the moment that it disappears philosophy begins, or that is to say, philosophy is always homesickness. Hegel affirms that. b) [1-1:48:21] Secondly, Hegel says there, and thats why Hegel attaches philosophy in the Differenzschrift to need: philosophy is not a free-floating...you know...begins in wonder nonsense! It begins in difficulty, in cultural difficulty, in people having problems and contradictions in their lives. It doesnt begin unconditionally, it doesnt begin with the question Why is there something rather than nothing? It begins because I cant make sense of my life, Im a mess. Thats how it began for Plato and thats how it began, by the way, for Descartes. Read the Discourse, the Discourse is about the loss of culture and the need to revivify culture. The Meditations presupposes the Discourse. Thats why philosophers dont know how to read
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Descartes: because they dont know how to take the Discourse seriously. Descartess system is grounded in the historical narrative of the discourse that talks about I could not find my place in the world. I was at the best school in the world, and I was the smartest student at the school, and still there was no truth. Right? Thats the rhetorical gimmick. If Im the smartest person at the best school in the world, and I dont see the truth, then the cultures in difficulty. Thats the opening shot of the Discourse. Its the problem of culture, the problem of who I am, that generates the second problem of the Cartesian system. c) [1-1:49:12] Secondly, Hegel argues in the Differenzschrift, that all philosophy must be an engagement with the history of philosophy. And thats simply because, which is repeated, by the way, in the introduction, but the importance there is he says: look, what happens to the notion of history if we deny that other philosophies have a claim on us? How are we to make sense of the thought that there is a historyand then hes criticizing Reinhold and Schultz in saying every one of them dismisses the history of philosophy so they can start fresh. How? From where? Is everything just a mistake? So philosophy has to be in relationship to its own past. So therefore philosophy is mediated culturally and mediated by its own history as a condition of its possibility. Hegel affirms that at the beginning of the nineteenth century before the Phenomenology, we know thats part of his system. Why on earth should anyone think its not true of the Phenomenology? I dont understand. 2. [1-1:49:52] Secondly, Hegel denies and denies everywhere, in all his writings, that there can be a neutral method. No method without content. 3. Its only presuppositionless for us, we people who are in this debate. The beginning is selfconsciously not presuppositionless.
E. Introduction
1. Its a natural assumption that philosophy is epistemological, Cartesian. Were in the world to the extent we represent the world is an attitude that exists only since Descartes. a) Hegel is going to deny that epistemology is first philosophy. b) epistemology as first philosophy is when representation is the problem of first philosophy as opposed to being merely a theory of knowledge. c) [1-1:54:35] Epistemology is first philosophy if and only if one understands that the relationship between an individual and the world is via representations of the world, and therefore the question of philosophy before any other question becomes: How do we put ourselves in relationship to exteriority via representations. Hence that becomes: Whats the criterion for the truth of representations? and thats epistemology. d) If we cant know anything, but we can know our representation, how is it were able to know representation in itself? Thats the contradiction. Its a realist standard of knowing, and maintains the realist standard when we examine cognition. Why is the mind easier to know than objects? The truth of knowing, essence, being-in-itself is a realist standard of knowing, and realism is troubled by the phenomena of representation. Nonetheless, we maintain our realism when it comes to examining cognition. e) We cant examine the instrument, get rid of the medium. That would still beg the question, since in order to examine anything you must have a criterion. f) [1-2:00:40] Epistemologists (Fichte) installed certainty as criterion, but as the one thing he cant show you. g) Theres no difference between modern faith, conviction, and cartesian certainty. Heidegger makes this point. Just dogmatism. 2. [2-0:00:00] If epistemology is a mistake and just circumvents, defers the moment of the Absolute, then in some sense the Absolute must already be here. We must presuppose that if its not outside us, then in some sense its already here. He wants to take that on. 3. [2-0:11:35] We can ignore epistemology because Science must appear. It cant be a hidden. Regardless of whether or not we recognize it as Science. We can ask the question about the possibility of knowledge not by trying to get beyond appearances, but saying that the world of the
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unconditioned must be in relationship to what appears. And since appearances are appearances for us, we can, by studying the appearances we study what reveals itself and shows itself to us, get to the question of what is truly. This isnt too quick because if Science is to appear, it must, within the realm of appearances itself, show itself to be Science and not illusion. That too must appear. Science is that movement of some set of appearances which, by its relation to itself and other things, reveals itself to be Science and not mere illusion, and that itself must be something that appears, or else were back to intellectual intuition, fates, and all that. The appearance/reality distinction must be something that appears and be part of the appearances, otherwise it would be unknowable. What processes are gone through to allow for this to occur? Hegel is turning us back to the world, examining what there is in its appearances. a) Were not examining our own minds, were not trying to abstract from the representation of the world. Rather its by looking at the representations themselves were asking what in the domain of representation itself how do certain representations come to appear as true and others as false. 4. Modern skepticism never questions subjectivity, quite unlike Roman skepticism, the attempt to show that for any proposition theres an equally good opposite. 5. Fichte: our self-relation to ourselves as agents as primordial to relation with the external world would ditch Kantian formalism. 6. The world of the unconditioned must be in relation to what appears. 7. The appearance-reality distinction must appear, must be knowable. What processes (human activities) allow this to occur? Were going to get a grip on it by seeing how it distinguishes itself from illusion. 8. [2-0:14:30] If theres science, it emerges in the way people make claims, the way those claims get corrected, and the like. The absolute must emerge from the world of appearances and isnt a priori. Theres no ontological difference between essence and appearance. Essence must appear. Else its unknowable, and skepticism is true. Its logically possible in Hegels procedure that skepticism is true. Hegelianism permits of absolute failure, and that seems to me its strength. And thats why his notion of the skeptical procedure is not modern. Because Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Locke cannot fail. Theyve got a certainty, even if it turns out to be a skeptical certainty. I dont have the world, but I know I have ideas. Old A.J. Ayer, you know, there he is, hes got his sense data. It may be a bit impoverished. Hegel preserves this possibility of failure: no claim to be science will necessarily establish itself. a) MARTIN: Can you run that one by again? How is the possibility of complete failure built into it? b) Its just that hes not going to presuppose that any claim to be science, any apparent claim, will establish itself. Because its not a regress. Skeptical regress into a certain domain of subjectivity. Thats why its an ancient skepticism. Its going to be saying heres a proposition, heres a counter proposition. Not quite like thatbut. The possibility of the whole thing collapsing is possible. We could discover that we cant call this knowledge and this nothing. Its possible. And a lot of people who read Hegel think Yeah! He fails. c) LIZ: The claim is that in a theory of knowledge that depends on.... The problem is totally shifted to: What does it mean for science to recognize itself as an appearance? d) Appearance and illusion are not the same thing. Not every appearance is an illusion. But its not a mere appearance. 9. [2-0:18:00] #77 Were going to assume that a claim to knowledge appears, and that it has its own movement, and that theres a whole series of these. Natural consciousness is, at each moment, the appearance form of any claim to knowledge. But the important point is the path of natural consciousness. Were going to have a narrative that is a quest for knowledge. a) If we take appearance seriously, then we dont want science to be free and self-moving immediately. We want science to be something that can appear as a consequence of a certain kind of quest. If we think about it this way then we can think of the quest what is knowledge,
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what is science as at one with the quest, the traditional quest, the religious quest of the self for salvation or redemption. That is, there is only one, as it were, quest narrative, the quest for Who am I? Since the idea of the quest is the narrative of all narratives, and the Christian one is the dominant one, we go through a series of experiences, and in those series of experiences we get purified, and in virtue of that purification, we come to our final redemption, salvation, identification. b) If it appears as self-moving (unconditioned) immediately, its suspicious. 10. [2-0:20:00] #78 a) [2-0:20:49] Its only in virtue of taking your position to be the truth, to be real knowledge, that you are pressed forward. b) Every time, because natural consciousness takes itself to be real knowledge, then when it loses that claim to absoluteness, it loses itself. c) Its the doubt/despair structure that Im driving at here. Theres something unserious about modern subjectivity, and what Hegels interested in are by turning to appearancesheres the ironyby turning to the appearances of knowing, we actually move out of the easy or facile game of modern skepticism and move into a way of despair. That is, where each form of natural consciousness can lose itself absolutely, its world can collapse. d) [2-0:23:05] Epistemological skepticism, the shilly shallying forth, isnt serious because nothings really at stake, but if we actually turn around and look at the appearances of knowing, all the claims of what knowing is, every claim as to how we are grounded in the world, then the idea of attempting to vindicate that claimand losing itis a pathway of despair. Theres a historical quest, a painful quest because people keep losing the truth, and with that they lose everything. e) The question is now at one with religion: How am I to be saved? Is there salvation? Is there truth? f) Theyre forms of life, philosophy, philosophical positions, if theyre anything, are fundamental ways of being in the world. What it is to be in a world with others in it. Every philosophical position isnt merely a thought-thing, but a form of social existence.
V. 3/22/94
1. preliminary a) Kant paradox: in order to be transcendental idealists we must have things in themselves, but this is unacceptable. b) [~2-0:27:00 the objectively subjective] Unintelligibility: why should an idealist accept Hegels move from modern skepticism to ancient skepticism? (1) We have non-inferential self-knowledge, self-awarenessmodern skepticism. I can doubt the world, but I cant doubt my representations. We can doubt the world, but not thought. So there is no dependency of my inner on the way the world is. The relationship between my inner and the way the world is is external, contingent. This raises the problem of representation. How am I going to get from whats inside to whats outside? (2) Leibnizs: world is populated by just different perspective on it. Each consciousness is just a take on how the world is. God brings in a preestablished harmony. Kant said this is logically compatible with my being the only monad. This is a consequence of modern skepticism. (3) [2-0:30:30] Cf. Critique of Pure Reason The Refutation of Idealism: My awareness of myself is actually dependent on, is mediated by the world. If the world varies, if I vary the world, I must vary my inner. c) Kant: the inner is logically dependent on the outer, so vary one, vary the other. Hegel is just going to replace the external with another self-consciousness. 2. #78: Doubt becomes despair because doubting the outside world means I doubt myself. Thats ancient skepticism.
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a) Were going to combine Cartesian radicalismnever to trust anything unless it counts for us as worthy, because thats what it is to try to vindicate a configuration of consciousness as Sciencewith the model in which inner and outer are mutually determining, so that once a consciousness loses its object if I can no longer have my object,then because Im dependent upon that object, I lose myself. Doubt turns into despair. b) If each doubt is a loss of self, then what were going to look at are configurations of consciousness, a relationship between consciousness and object. The series of the configurations of consciousness is the education of consciousness to the standpoint of Science. c) #28, #29 (1) Who we are cannot be identified independently of the history we have passed through. (2) The phenomenology is going to activate all the sedimentations that are presupposed by our actual activities, what we do and sayfor Hegel: Subject. By showing theres a history here were showing the Substance. Everything in my head has been not just in my head, but is formed by collective social practice, and were retrieving those strata of practice. Were trying to tap our own collective unconscious. Its not something external, but a kind of collective psychoanalysis. But Hegel doesnt pretend, for example, that Oedipus maps on to all times and places, though unconscious does. [2-0:39:10: historicizing Oedipus.] (3) E.g. because of Luther, even Catholics are now Protestants. Were all protestants. It doesnt matter whether youre a Jewish Protestant since each of us has a free relationship to our God. We make Protestant choices, and this is due to Luther. We dont go through a Lutheresque moment on the way to religious tolerance; rather, its the case that that factic history is sedimented in our actual practices. E.g. you cant return to tradition out of freewill without there being a paradox. Luther is quite unlike Descartes. (4) [Is sedimentation, for Hegel, the silent weaving of the spirit?] (5) [Does Subject create its inorganic, sedimented history and then take it for its object?] (a) If entire history is not sedimented in the word, then something has been abstracted. (b) The narrative of the present can only be objective by abstracting some sedimentation and taking that for an object, but the Subjects abstracted part of itself. (c) I.e. Luther is only necessary to the hegemonic symbolic (temporality is missing from the mono-symbolic). Other symbolics may have different sedimentations, i.e., negated some other part of itself and took that for its object. Else its a Universal Law. (6) [2-0:45:50] We hope to produce a Cartesian skepticism even more radical than Descartes that ends up in a position of knowing. Its not merely a return to ancient skepticism; its an invocation of ancient skepticism to produce a more modern skepticism. A unique synthesis of the ancient and modern. 3. #79 Determinate negation a) A series, a history of the development of consciousness, and the necessary progression/interconnection of the forms of unreal consciousness will itself bring to pass the completion of the series. Hes not merely handing us a dogmatism; rather, hes telling us that thats the only way were ever going to get there. b) This is the first time that history is taken as really formative of consciousness, since unreal forms of consciousness are determinate. c) [2-0:51:00] For Hegel, passion and reason are of the same order, hence his deep antiKantianism. [Hence it puts the contingency back in necessity.] For Hegel, theres no ultimate split between Eros and Logos. Were passionate creatures. 4. #80 a) [2-0:53:35] The goal is for Subject and Object to respond (not correspond) to one another, since its now a story between subjects. But progress is unhalting because consciousness cant get no satisfaction, i.e., theres no correspondence.
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b) [2-0:55:40] Youre vested in your world because you think it will provide satisfaction [i.e. negate your desire]. When you lose your symbolic order, you lose your world. But that order isnt a fact, its a horizon [Husserlian]. Consciousness, then, is already outside its own factical relationship to the world. Thats what drives things on to the next phase. c) The investment here is in the normativity of the practice as constituting the being of that world. If that gets lost by the very attempt to found it, its a world that collapses, not just a fact that happens. Thats the sense in which youre already beyond your world. You are the very horizon and the connection of world and object. Consciousness is already beyond since it sets up the relationship. That whole is the condition of possibility of your being satisfied. d) How can we generate a procedure? So now that we know what kind of story it is, how can we tell the story in a way thats rhetorically answerable to its audience? e) Who am I is given by the horizon I project. Whats beyond the horizon is not the beyond but a beyond. For Hegel, consciousness is transcendence because it is the creation-projection of the horizon. f) The horizon becomes visible in the time of crisis. Before that, one was already transcendent, but one just didnt know it. 5. #81 a) How are we going to carry out this project of surveying the various forms of consciousness? The philosopher would say that we need a standard. But if we had one, wed need no procedure. 6. #82 a) [2-1:04:00] We can overcome the contradiction by notingthis is the turning point of the whole introductionthe distinction between truth and what is the essence, what is the standard, and knowledge or awareness of that is itself constitutive of the structure of consciousness. b) Consciousness is an intentional relation to an object. And an intentional relation to an object means that something appears as an object if and only if consciousness brings itself into relationship with the object, that is, it sets itself into a meaningful relationship. Hence the knowing of an object and consciousness is itself the work of consciousness. c) This relationship of consciousness to object is what Kant calls apperception. Kant: nothing can be an object for consciousness unless I think it is an object of my consciousness. The I think must accompany all our representations, or they would be nothing to me. Every relationship to an object is an intentional relation, that is a perceiving, a dreaming, a wondering, a questioning, a thinking about, desiring, or a doubting, etc. The object must be for me. d) [2-1:09:09] Furthermore, every intentionality of consciousness has a particular form. Every consciousness stipulates (horizon) its concept of an object, what it means to have a world. (1) E.g. for Aquinas its ens creatum. For another, everything reflects God (faith). e) [2-1:12:30] What phenomenology is is simply watching each form of consciousness test itself. f) Essence is what consciousness stipulates as its concept of an object, the in-itself. Each form of consciousness stipulates its own criterion of truth, and stipulates what it is to know that. g) Its concept of an object is its interpretation for each concrete object. Hegels methodology: Does the actual experience of the object match the claim of what the object is? h) But its only the transcendental idealists for whom it is the case that the relationship between consciousness and object is an internal relationship set by particular categorial articulations of the world. Thats what transcendental idealism is. Transcendental because you have these forms that give the subject-object relationship. Ergo this idea of consciousness measuring itself as a methodology is not presuppositionless, is not neutral, is not absolutely objective. On the contrary, its only acceptable to we we transcendental idealists. Hegel presupposes the Copernican turn, makes it into a method. The Copernican turn: asking if the object must match the demands of consciousness. That principle is Hegels methodology.

i)
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self: world:: (1) form of knowing: Concept of Object (essence; that which is known immediately; the in itself, the truth) (2) sense-certainty: particulars (sense certaintys truth or essence; This) (not really given a chance in the Phenomenology.) (3) perception: things with properties (4) understanding: forces and laws j) [2-1:21:10] He says: either we have to stipulate a criterion; no we dont have to stipulate a criterion because consciousness is this measurement. That makes it presuppositionless for the idealists. k) Methodologically it seems to me either some form of idealism is shown to be true, or skepticism is shown to be true, but at no point is realism shown to be true in its own terms. A strong version of representational realism isnt given a chance here. l) [2-1:24:00] If we are idealists, well be seduced by the move from #81 to #82 into thinking that what weve got is a neutral methodology. Because for us idealists, idealism is natural and objective. The Hegelians have simply fallen for the seduction since that movement is precisely whats natural for transcendental idealists. m) The new object emerges when theres a failure of correspondence between the form of knowing and the object. 7. The object of immediate sense certainty changes with context. The change of context cannot be accounted for in sense-certainty. E.g. This is noon. The notion of This in its immediacy picks out nothing. The belief that I had that I knew the object immediately was merely a belief. At first I thought it was the truth. Desire emerges as soon as I lose my first certainty. As soon as I lose my first certainty (Freud: the moment I can distinguish myself from the Mother), I want to recapture it. If its a loss of certainty, which is after all a way of giving my self the worldthe certainty is the emphatic moment of the givingits the way Im staked in that giving. The certainty is the way in which Im staked in a giving of the world. 8. #86 a) Repeats determinate negation at the level of phenomenological movement. b) [2-1:33:35] Experience is the conversion of consciousness. It is always the experience of a loss of a form of engaging with the world and the coming on of a new one. Thats what it means to have an experience: to be turned around or converted, transformed or transfigured. c) Consciousness doesnt see that the transition from the first object to the second is a determinate negation, and therefore the form of a generation in which its re-jiggling the world, its being educated. It just thinks its gotten out of a paradigm and discovered a new one. 9. #87 a) What we bring to the story: the way in which the various forms of consciousness are internally connected with one another, one generating the next as an experience of education. Its making those connections that makes phenomenology itself a form of science. 10. #88 a) The Phenomenology is the science of consciousnesss experience. Its not knowledge of an absolute object, but a certain way in which knowledge is no longer conditioned, no longer caught in the trammels of the experience of consciousness. b) The past is not a sequence of mere mistakes, but are my substance. Thats why the relation to the past should be not just memory, but mourning. c) Hegel was fighting against the instrumentalization of reason that was resulting from the natural sciences-humanities split.
VI. 3/24/94
1. summary a) Introduction presupposes an audience of transcendental idealists.
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b) You must be operating with some conception of what an object is. Every object is determined by some concept of an object. Hence everything in the section on consciousness is pre-determined, since consciousness if the denial that (1) I am aware of myself perceiving. Soft, neutral generalization of transcendental idealist. c) Our methodology is self-conscious, so the section on consciousness is pseudo. d) Sense-certainty, understanding, never have a chance because theyre posed reflectively, not as immediate awarenesses. Suggest: the task of consciousness is to give us a genealogy of self-consciousness. e) In being committed to the standpoint of apperception, were beyond epistemology and in the world as active, purposive, practical beings. (1) Against the neo-Kantians primacy of the first Critique over the second and third. 2. [2-1:53:00] Warminskys Derridean worry about exemplarity.
B. Sense-certainty
1. Why start with sense-certainty? We want to begin with an epistemological view that radically negates apperceptive principle. a) Want to: presuppose objective realism (object as what make knowledge [] out of consciousness). Is there anything simpler that sense-certainty? b) Posing: Sense-certainty is simplest epistemologic. One form of what absolute knowing might be. So were in a sense beyond it, reflecting on an epistemic paradise. 2. Just by being (weakly) self-consciousness, we require Kants first critique and cant really start as Hegel does from sense- certainty. We cant reflect on sense-certainty in its own terms, but need some minimal rationality. 3. Each claim to immediacy invokes or presupposes a suppressed negativity or mediation which allows determinacy. a) Hegels argument: Whats missing is the act of determination (Kantian synthesis). The claim isnt that we cant be aware of determinate objects, nor a denial that we have some passivity in relation to the world. Its just that the sensuousness, passivity, etc. are always already mediated (symbolic). Apperceptive principle is what allows us to move on. 4. [2-1:59:31], [3-0:00:00] #109 a) Sense-certainty isnt a given but a philosophical position. It suppresses its own rational activity. b) Instead of saying something concrete, it empties the world of all determinacy, everything becoming universal. om. c) Hegel dissolves the question of the unity of thought and Being. Not a mind-dependence of the world, unity of thought and being, but a dissolution of the problem, Undermining strategy, not synthetic. d) To name is to kill the object (in its absolute immediacy). E.g. since it relates it to all other roses, etc. 5. Encyclopedia #418 Hegel admits to question-begging #95-96 on the This. 6. The determining activity of the mind (its suppression of negativity) is what causes sensecertainty to collapse in its own terms, which is revealed by its suppression of universals. The question is external to self-certainty, but the demonstration is not. 7. Hegel refuses the linguistic turn, linguistic idealism Language and human activity mediate each other (Hegelian). Thats why Adorno is so interesting. 8. Immediacy cannot accommodate determinacy.
C. Perception
1. The simplest move out of sense-certainty is the inclusion of universals. Immediate, direct knowledge of a particular as having universal properties. The move to perception. Properties must be universal, not proper names. Cant be instances, things, but are inherent in things (antiPlatonic).
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2. A mere succession of properties doesnt discriminate a thing. An object collects those many into a One. 3. Either the unity of the object follows from the succession (the Also), or unity precedes succession (the One). 4. If some properties are contiguous, how can we tell the boundaries of the properties? Succession cant stop. Move to the One. But the we use the properties. The One and the Also presuppose each other. 5. Epistemology as first philosophy arises when the world is no longer a natural totality. When people lose the sense of placement and try to reconnect to the world in terms of representational pictures. 6. If the object is just its properties as I perceive them, the object is based on contingencies and is not determinate. Object is an Also, and its Oneness is in the mind. a) [Q: What about temporalized properties and retroactive naming?]
D. Force and the Understanding

1. Move to two-tiered model a) Appearances are appearances of essences (forces) (unconditioned universals, nonsensible). b) Newton: no hypotheses; I infer from appearances. c) [reductio of complex argument:] But what underlies appearances is ultimately arbitrary and underdetermined. So there is no simple connection between appearances and unconditioned universals. d) #136: Once you construct a curtain, you can put anything you want behind the curtain. e) #147: Supersensible comes from appearance. f) #163: Explanation as a becoming self-conscious. [Is it a becoming self-consciousness because (for formal reason) a supersession of self-sundering?]
VII.
4/5/94
1. Move from consciousness to self-consciousness via explanation. 2. The conscious attempt to remove its own activity disappears. 3. infinity = Hegelian idealism consciousnesss return to itself. Bad infinity = regress of explanations. a) infinity is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference. 4. Knower rather than known a) does consciousness conform to object or vice versa? Copernican turn. b) But Hegels somewhat different from that, not simple reversal. 5. Why do community members take communal norms as legislative for practice? 6. Failures of self-world correspondence reveal a desire for certainty. 7. Experience requires a forgetfulness of negativity in order to achieve certainty. 8. Desire speaks to a sense of the self as lost. The desire that certainty responds to is partially constitutive of subjectivity.
B. The Truth of Self-Certainty

1. #166 a) Hegel is changing the topic. Not the question of epistemology as first philosophy since thats impossible. Were noting the world via our representation, but first via our selfrelationships. And self-relation is mediated through relation to an other. Self-consciousness is both intersubjective and intrasubjective. b) Not the question of representation but of self-possession. c) Primitive: the world appears only insofar as it satisfies my desires (Descartes, Hobbes). 2. #174 a) As soon as you satisfy your desire, youre hungry again soon after. The fact of persistent reemergence shows that desires arent just part of me. b) In order to have desires that are mine, I must have a non-given desire.
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3. #176 a) Object must have such a desire that shows that the desire is independent of the object. The object must itself negate its independence. So I must change the nature of my desire: must be autonomous, and object has to negate itself in favor of my desire. b) If you desire objects, youre doomed, so you must be desiring something else: recognition, the desire that another desire my desire. Also, its not just a desire for self-presence. c) Self-consciousness has to think that theres nothing higher. The first moment. It eventually will acknowledge its biological life. Is the thinking that theres nothing higher precisely the willingness to risk life? d) But is the value in the risk. There cant be an acknowledgment of the necessity of biological life. e) Hyppolite: how we come to learn about the meaning of biological life in relation to selfconsciousness. This is different from Kojve. 4. #187-188 a) We need to learn about life. b) By accepting the life-death struggle, you accept Natures rules: Victory or Death. So: how do we depart from Nature? 5. #189 a) Must move away from natural life. Life is as essential to self-consciousness as pure selfconsciousness. b) Both Master and Slave must learn this. c) Hegel doesnt explicitly claim that the subject is grounded in intersubjectivity, but thats the case. Kojve capitalizes on this as first moment its acknowledged in philosophy. Intersubjectivity (sociality) doesnt emerge out of subjectivity, individualism. d) Spirit ultimately replace life, though it includes life in it, as well as death. e) Master-Master => death; Slave-Slave => run away so Master-Slave is the boringly logical solution. f) Being as Master is the reduction of the other to oneself. 6. If all relations are internal, Master is reduced to a status relationship. a) If all relations are external, these wouldnt be self-conscious since I could not be mediated by the other. 7. So recognition can be neither external nor internal. Recognition is the relation between these two types of relations. 8. Keep your eye out for the moments of external relatedness. 9. Hegel is aware of this problem of the lack of radical alterity. 10. Life is necessary to self-consciousness => life isnt merely constituted by self-consciousness. But in learning that, I put myself in relationship to that independence. This is constitutive of identity, self-consciousness. 11. [Q: But is recognition then equal to pain in Science of Logic 770? Yes if Master-Slave is totally internal to subject. No if Master-Slave preserves the possibility of radical alterity. But the relationship to the radically Other can only be my relation to the way the Other is figured and exceeds those figurations. The relation to the impossibility of he Other. But my impossibility of the Other may differ from the radically Others impossibility of the Other.] 12. Self-consciousness is the switching station between self-relation and relation to the other. There cant be one without the other. 13. Derrida is over-enthusiastic in reading Bataille (restricted and General Economy). So he doesnt acknowledge Hegels differentiated reading of Death. 14. #190 a) Making the simple point of how intersubjectivity is constitutive of objects and subject. b) [Q: Is mastery a return to jouissance or a perpetual pursuit of objets a? Are these equivalent in their erasure of the subject?]
78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein VIII. 4/7/94
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1. All mastery does is: mastery gives intersubjective form to the masters victory. All masters do is affirm their transcendence over the natural world. 2. Masters recognition by slave is a forced confession of a prisoner even if its true. 3. #193 a) Self-consciousness is not a given of the human condition, but is social and historical. Unlike Kants moral law, Descartess cogito. b) Its an achievement, but non-self-transparent (i.e. it preserves dependency and capacity). A condition in which we lack full self-possession. We dont master self-consciousness. 4. #194 a) fear of death > agitation > being-for-self > negativity > work (mediated desire) > freedom (History) b) The fear of the Lord i the beginning of wisdom because fear of the Lord is the fear of Death. More radical than castration, Law of the Father. c) Its only with the socialization of the fear of death that human activity can shape sociality. d) Need becomes desire when the object of consciousness itself possesses autonomy. e) Lacans Kojvian Hegel. Original desire for recognition = demand. Chinese meal = need. X = desire f) The lesson of slavery is that every desire is contingent and can be denied absolutely. g) Slave then becomes self-conscious by recognizing a relation to his desires: CANcan have some but not others. Self- consciousness is the distance of ones non-identity with oneself. Mastery erases this distance: I am an Other. h) The givenness of nature < the naturalness of desire. Once desires arent natural, the objects are transformable via the notion of work. i) Work is (the actuality of) the human capacity for intelligent activity. What makes work work is its being done for an other. Work is desire held in check. 5. #195 a) But the objects are repositories of possibility for the slave, but if the souffle isnt the masters creation, but slaves. We havent achieved this, though weve allowed a certain givenness of desire. Only a desire for anothers desire is free of naturalness. 6. #196 a) Work is the process of introjection. b) How does fear become something more than stark terror, purely formal? c) Absolute fear is essential because the formative activity is groundless. Without absolute fear, you merely act on desire, respond to the given. d) If youre merely afraid of the Lord and dont see the relation between negativity and death, youre existing in relation to some givenness. e) What must be revealed is that there is no Absoluterevealed via servitude. f) [Kaja criticism respond to a givenness because its not self-aware of its own servitude.] g) Were the kinds of being that lack an essence. Any negation of the Absolute must be recovered apperceptively, for-me. h) Action: negativity:: repetition: monotony i) The theory-practice distinction is a misunderstanding of self-consciousness. The nonnegativity of self-consciousness is essential to action. j) The unhappy consciousness is the dominant form in which weve lived. 7. #197 a) Stoicism: Slave attempts to thematize his labor. Its in the notion of form that the real negativity of self-consciousness is demonstrated. b) Only in though am I truly free. Life is unessential. Freedom in the concept. But it false since all concrete content is excluded and the world becomes an irrational given and the Stoic
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is left with abstract thought => tedium (recurrence of the structural moment of indifference) => skepticism. 8. #202 a) Stoicism: A view of servile consciousness from the perspective of mastery. b) Skepticism: self-understanding of servile consciousness from the perspective of slavery. 9. #205 a) Skeptical doubt is dependent on sensual objects. b) Empirical vs. transcendental self-consciousness. This distinction is phenomenologically generated out of skepticism. 10. #206 a) God is my essential self and Im the inessential moment in that relation. b) Descartes (1) Movement in the first three meditations: x is the case => I think x is the case (Stoicism) (2) The radicalization of the doubt is its reification. Descartes know its a kind of universal skepticism (3) God becomes essential for truth, but no the cogito. So man depends on God and God depends on man since Gods epistemic benevolence is crucial to His mediating meaning. (4) Cogito is a form of unhappy consciousness, Stoicism. c) Kant (1) Need empirical reality which counts for nothing, but which I depend upon. An ethical version of skeptical consciousness. (2) Kant: but wouldnt reality be a delusion if the evil thrived and the good suffered? Need coordination between natural desire and ethical rightness. So God is posited as ideal object in order to have the realization of skepticism. (3) Breakup of self into essential-inessential, active-passive causes problem fixed by positing of a beyond. This is the form of the movement, for Hegel, into skepticism. (4) As opposed to Pascal, Kant is a Jewish thinker. d) Hegel is using historical contents (history of religion) to talk about abstract theoretical structures of self-consciousness. 11. #210 a) Movement of chapter is like Judaism where the absolute Other is not particular. b) Christ becomes particular, Church as mediator between absolute other and the self. Then priest as mediator => why not me as mediator (Luther)? c) Then pure Faith and you can fuse yourself with the Universal. d) Then it becomes Reason. e) The moments of dependence and independence are kept separate. Theres then always a question as to how theyre related. (1) Unhappy consciousness is the explicit attempt to think this difference and maintain them as opposed, whereas Stoicism and Skepticism jettisoned dependence. (2) => unhappy consciousness is the truth of self-consciousness, its most explicit thematization. f) Reason is still an abstract form for what happens when we realize that the moments of selfconsciousness need no longer be opposed. g) Reason is no more an adequate conception of Hegelian idealism than self-consciousness. You dont get Hegel and a shift in the phenomenological mold until the chapter on Spirit. h) reason is also a (temporary) structural form of self-understanding. Reason is more historical than consciousness and self-consciousness, but its not yet Reason in the Hegelian sense because it denies Spirit. 12. [4-0:05:00] The chapter on reason isnt the begining of Hegelian idealism. The Chapter on spirit is.
IX. 4/12/94
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1. moving from self-consciousness to Reason via religion a) In some sense the position as a conscientious self is unavoidable, the truth of Antigone. Not obviously Hegelian. b) Hegelian self-consciousness is close to colloquial sense of everybody looking at me. Our reflective self relation is only by being in relation to an other. Un-Descartes-like. c) The very notion of subjectivity is, then, a modern creation. d) Christianity as a [tropic?] language to reveal self-consciousness. (1) Christianity is a self-conscious about our split nature (as opposed to Stoicism and Skepticism) through the projection of its essence into God. Judaism is un-self-conscious thematization of the split. (2) Christianity problematizes the split: wants the messiah now, whereas Judaism gives up. (3) Christianity is concerned over mediation: of particular-universal, essential-inessential [ergo Kants judaism? (the transcendental beyond)] (4) The Church as mediator. (5) Protestantism, where the self enters into mediation with God-Absolute. [But what about Jonah?] But this makes God redundant: faith becomes the immediacy of reason, epistemic certainty. (a) If having faith is to be in possession of a relation to the absolute, then being saved via faith gives me the absolute directly. Subjectivity itself becomes the condition of access (Pascals belief), since faith (authority) comes from me, not outside. Hence Gods redundant. e) Descartess work was the prologue to a scientific treatise, but he suppressed it when he heard about Galileo. Hes an out-and-out atheist. f) The transition is phenomenological and historical. Reason affirms unity of thought and being. An internal relationship to the universal is reason. g) Galileo-Descartes: mathematics (Reason) is the truth of the physical world, since appearance is never all the possible appearance.
B. Reason
1. two parts: observing and practical reason (#348: this split is the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness) 2. The study of reason is really the study of ethical or moral individualism, since it requires recognition. 3. movement of the chapter on Reason a) reason = individualism b) concept of knowing (always something unreflective, opaque here: individualism: the world refuses to play ball.): concept of world (1) raw individualism: () (2) desire for pleasure (hedonism not a skepticism, but a principle): opaque necessity (violent ordering) (3) Law of the heart (heart instead of pleasure): others (4) virtue: way of the world (5) work, prudential: (6) moral rationalism, Kant: (7) : the matter at hand (world tries to vindicate itself) c) Reason was doomed to fail because its individualistic, but above all because its an abstraction based on the forgetfulness of the very history that formed it. d) #233: Reason comes on the scene as a certainty and immediacy that is doomed to dogmatism. e) Spirit is {we thats an I, History, knowledge of itself within its history}. Cf. #441. f) [4-0:34:36] Hegel is going to want to claim that ethics and morality is both objective and lacks all criterion.
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4. [4:0:35:00] The final moment of Reason, and how Hegel gets to Spirit. a) The last moment of reason is reason as a tester of laws, and as Ive said before, whats being talked about here is Kants notion of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative says that the minimum necessary condition for any maxim of action to be permissible is that it be 1) can be willed equally, in the same way, in the same respect, by all. Its the principle of universality or universalization. And since that notion of universality looks like its saying nothing more than like cases should be treated alike, and since we may say that to say that like cases should be treated differently seems sheer arbitrariness, then it looks as if Kant is asking after a minimal notion of consistency. Hes asking, What is consistency in action. And hes saying consistency in action must mean something like treating like cases alike, or treating like cases alike means in practical terms that people in like circumstances be capable of willing the same actions. Just capable. They could. Not that they do, or will, or ought to. But that they could. Thats the question being asked. Anything that fails that will show that the action is not a consistent one, that is, youre not being consistent with yourself, nor in allowing a relationship to others. b) This is again rationalistic in a minimal way that seems hard for us to deny. Namely what were asking about any particular action is we are assuming that when we will an action, our wills are legislative. Were not merely doing something, but were as it were instituting a norm of action. The reason I say that isnt something we should want to deny is that unless we have that view, that the meaning of individual action is that its legislative, then I think that the notion of individuality disappears. c) Im saying that the notion of self-determination requires that we think of each action as being legislative. Which is why the real solipsistic relativist is incoherent. Because theyre so worried about individualism that they cant see that what it is to be an individual is to be lawmaking. Otherwise the notion that there is an individual as opposed to being lost in the collective loses coherence. That notion that individual acts are legislative is one, in fact, that Hegel does not deny. Hes not Nietzschean either, he doesnt deny it. d) [4-0:37:25] So what is his objection to Kant given that the way Ive described it, what Kant is saying seems so weak that it seems impossible to deny its validity? e) Hegels answer seems to me a drop more subtle than it is usually portrayed as being. Hegel is not claimingand I want to be absolutely clear about thisthat individual actions should not be consistent in a Kantian way. But if hes not denying that, what is he denying? What hes denying is that the moral law, the categorical imperative, is the overriding and criterial notion for moral rightness. And the argument goes something like this. The example he gives is one of returning property you borrowed. Something like that. And this is one of the types of examples that Kant makes much ado about. And its very simple to see why this works out neatly for Kantian purposes. Namely, Kant says Well look. Say I promise falsely that I will return your records. That I have no intention of doing so. Could that be moral? Kant says Well, lets look at it. If we imagine that everybody who borrowed things refused to return them, then people would stop lending them and the institution would break down. Ergo, I cant consistently will that thought. And therefore Im committed to the idea that peoples property ought to be returned to them. Hegel says that its an illusion that its the categorical imperative that is determining the goodness of returning property. Its an illusion because that we should return borrowed goods derives from an anterior commitment to private property, that people have rightful possession. But the categorical imperative will not tell us whether we ought to have a system of private property or not. So if we now alter the case a little bit and ask What about the person whos starving to death, is it OK for them to steal? Is it ok for the workers who are locked out to take over the bosss factory? then the categorical imperative falls silent. It falls silent when the debate is between two particular forms of life: one in which there wouldnt be private property and one in which there would be private property. But of the goodness or badness of those forms of life, it can tell us nothing. But we are most legislative as individuals,
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that is we enter into our strongest moral self-consciousness, in willing the structures of the forms of life we inhabit. That is, that s when I am truly legislative. Not in my individual action, but when I agree with everyone else that were going to have a democratic society, or were going to have a racist society, you know, or a materialist society. In all those fundamental choices is when Im truly legislative. Its the moment when Im truly legislative that determines the fundamental structures of the fundamental institutions of the society that the categorical imperative between all the kinds of possibilities we may choose says nothing. But that it says nothing is not a matter of indifference for Hegel because in making the categorical imperative absolutely authoritative for us, the categorical imperative necessarily puts out of play our dependence on the very fundamental arrangements and our allegiance to them as the constitutive ethical questions that we face. But if our will receives its maxims from arrangements of that kind and is only truly legislative in willing such arrangements, then the categorical imperative procedure must deprive us of our fundamental moral identity and the moral constitution of our will. So it actively alienates us from our ethical substance. And it does so by pretending that our moral core is elsewhere, it pretends that our moral core is in the categorical imperative and not in the collective acts of willing a particular form of life. So we may put it this way: the moral law is indifferent to the substantial ends of the will. How individuals realize themselves in and through engaging themselves in particular forms of social activity where part of the purpose of engaging those forms of social activity is to affirm, to give credence to, those forms of activity themselves. That is, theres a relationship between our particular acts and the kinds of institutions we embody in them. So in engaging in familial acts, we put ourselves in relation to the institution of the family. And those of us who have problems with family ergo have to forego...right? So acts have a double register: we both are pursuing particular ends that are committed and opened up by various institutional practices, but in so doing, we are putting ourselves in relation to those institutions themselves and affirming or denying them in various ways. The Kantian procedure brackets the latter. Its only from the latter that we have an ethical identity. So it is the contention that the categorical imperative is supremely authoritative for us, and not the requirement for consistency itself, to which Hegel objects. Thats what Hegel means when he says that Kant is a formalist and that Kant has no content. Thats what it amounts to. It amounts to a, not direct, but indirect challenge because it says that something that is secondary is being made primary. Its not an absolute denial of the Kantian position, its a denial of its absoluteness. Because of course once I do accept, say, private property, and I will a form of life in which thats the case, then stealing is wrong. And it would be inconsistent both to want and uphold both a form of life in which we had private property, and to espouse the goodness of stealing. But thats not because Im an abstract moral agent, but because Ive determined historicallybut groundlesslythat as far as I can make out, the best form of life possible is one in which there is private property. I dont actually think thats true. I think private propertys confused, but thats the kind of thought thats required. And for that there are no ultimate criteria. Which is to say what? Its to say that the content which the moral law espouses comes from elsewhere. The content, the force (thats always the big question: whats the real force of the moral law, why does it really compel?) and Ive said that the force doesnt derive from logicalitythe compulsion, in the sense of feeling that rightness and being willing to go along with it, comes from my anterior commitment to a particular form of life. So the content comes from something we have willed. And what gives force to particular maxims and their universality is something we have willed. But thats what Hegel means by Spirit. So the truth of the moral law is that it gets all its content from collective forms of life. Hence the ground of Reason is Spirit. If you can live with that word.
C. Spirit
1. [4-0:44:28] As a matter of information, the best abstract description of the notion of Spirit occurs in the middle of the chapter on reason, paragraphs #347-#359.
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2. In broad terms, Hegel tells us that everything weve been looking at up to now is an abstraction from Spirit, where Spirit has, as I suggested, the three dimensions, that is, one which is a mutual determination between we and I. a) That is to say, in order to have an individual identity, you must equally have a social identity. That all individuation is a process of socialization, and that therefore every individual identity is simply a mode, or form, or way of inhabiting a particular form of social life. b) Secondly, Spirit is history, as Hegel says
[#441] These shapes, however, are distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that they are real Spirits, actualities in the strict meaning of the word, and instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, are shapes of a world.
(1) So, roughly, all being is being-in-the-world, and to be in the world is to be in some world, and to be in some world is to be in a world that is distinct from other worlds, both spatially and temporally. Although for Hegel, spatial distance is not very significant. Which is to say that every fundamental element of which we ever become conscious is something that has been historically shaped and formed. That there are, as it were, whatever potentialities we may have for speaking a language, or being socialized or whatever, the fundamental structures themselves all emerge and are articulated in historically and socially specific ways. c) Finally, although we havent got there yet, Spirit is knowledge of itself in its history. 3. And thats what makes this chapter different from every other chapter. Every other chapter has been asking the question about what are the conditions of possibility, you might say, for selfpossession. We went through the forms of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and discovered that the unity of thought and being is, which is the claim of reason, is only realized as its actuality in Spirit. That reason gets its reality and content from Spirit. So whats most realand if I could use the old philosophical wordwhat is Substance of the world is Spirit. So what we are now coming to see, starting from where we have been, is that subject is substance, where substance is understood in terms of Spirit. Hence:
[#439] Spirit, being the substance and the universal, self-identical, and abiding essence, is the unmoved solid ground and starting-point for the action of all, and it is their purpose and goal, the in-itself of every self-consciousness expressed in thought.
a) Its very important, when we hear and read these descriptions of Spirit, hes using all the classical predicates applied to God: Spirit is the unmoved mover; it is the unmoved solid ground. Notice the purpose and goal. We are Spirit, and Spirit is our purpose and goal. A very Aristotelian formulation. Dont worry about cashing these out at the moment. Ill come back to these at the very end of the text. Hes just giving us a brief glimpse of a fundamental idealist claim. You notice now what Hegel seems to mean by idealism is simply that what is substance, which at the beginning of the text was the ultimate matter of fact, the thing-in-itself, has now become Spirit. So the relationship between subject and object has become subjects inhabitation of a Spiritual life, as the truth of what it is to be a human being. That our ground is Spirit.
[#439] As substance, Spirit is unshaken righteous self-identity; but as being-for-self, it is a fragmented being, self-sacrificing and benevolent, in which each accomplishes his own work, rends asunder the universal being, and takes from it his own share.
b) That is, the claim is, and this is the sort of thing that Derrida and the like are worried about, theres no authentic rational outside to Spirit. We as yet have no reason to buy any of this stuff about benevolent self-sacrificing. But again, the point of these claims, especially at this point in time, is to be provocative. The absolute substance of the world is Spirit, and Spirit is going to be self-sacrificing and benevolent just like Jesus? And so on, and so forth, I mean, come on. Hes trying to get his readers really worked up.
[#440] Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it.
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c) That was my fundamental claim here: that nothing has any reality independent of it. All these things have been abstractions based on, as we saw at the beginning of reason, on forgetting.
[#440] They result from Spirit analysing itself, distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each. This isolating of those moments presupposes Spirit itself and subsists therein. In other words, the isolation exists only in Spirit, which is a concrete existence.
d) And then hell say things in those paragraphs I mentioned earlier, like Spirit manifests itself in the
laws and customs of a nation. Because those are the fundamental shared linguistic and discursive practices that constitute any particular social formation as being this very social formation. Each has its own particularity. Now, having said all that, one might ask the reasonable question: Why doesnt Hegel just get on with it and tell us all about Spirit? We just discovered the truth, its Spirit. You all look as bored as sin...all this work for this? Well, theres a problem, and youre right to feel theres a problem, namely this claim about Spirit is something that has no phenomenological reality. This is something that we as observers, in looking at Kantianism in a certain way, can, as it were, critically theorize. But the question is this: How could we come to experience the truth of our subjectivity, the truth of my subjectivity as a Spiritual one? Hence the third version, the third feature of Spirit, that Spirit is a knowledge of itself in its history means that youre right to feel neutral because all youve been offered is an abstraction, shot from a pistol. You might as well be doing sociological theory. You know, weve been going through modes of sociological individualism, now well go through forms of sociological holism. So this chapter, the chapter on Spirit, must provide us, as it were, for the first time, with a real history which is the history of how we who claim to have an insight into the truth could have that insight. That is, we must provide a history of Spirit which will be a history of those moments within Western history through which and by means of which we as a culture are enabled to come to an insight about our own theoretical self-consciousness. Which is to say that we must now provide a genealogy of ourselves, and the condition of possibility of the insight which we have as idealists presumably accepted by our reading of the text up to here. So the question is now going to be: Who are we? Because everythings been an abstraction from that. And reason is that abstraction because it thinks that you can ask the question about the fundamental ground for the possibility of experience in abstraction form the historical reality of your position. But if it turns out that Spirit is the ground that cant itself be said ahistorically and neutrally, and if youre doing the same, then it must be said in a mode in which asking about the possibility of that saying is the same as asking the question about who you are. And to ask the question about who you are is to ask the question of the history that formed and made you possible. Because that is who you are. [4-0:52:14] So the chapter on Spirit is going to track these modes that are going to allow an insight into Spirit, and thats going to be my first claim. My first claim at the end is going to be that its only that moment, the experience of the insight that we are Spirit, that is going to be foundational, that makes Spiritual insight and insight into the nature of Spirit the same thing. Thats a puzzling way of making...what I want to claim is: ethical insight and metaphysical insight are the same. That theres no such thing, I mean, if Hegel has been objecting all along to pure theory, and to pure metaphysics, and to reason as observer, and to the idea of the world as an object, then his philosophy cannot return to a form of mere spectatorial theorizing. But if thats the case, then the insights of his philosophy must themselves be experientiallyin his sense of the word, Erfahrunggrounded. That is, there must be some historical experience that we go through, which is an experience that we have as individuals, into our social and historical predicament that yields an actual metaphysical insight. So Im going to say that the idea of philosophical insight and the idea of having an ethical experience have to be united, or [else] we have dissolved the very terms of reference that weve been generating up till now. So we have to have a history, and that history is going to start where all such histories start, with ancient Greece, especially if youre German. And he says:
[#441]
4. [4-0:53:48] So were going to start with a form of Spirit that is indeed Spiritual, that is a form in which individualsand were going to call this ethical life, Sittlichkeita form of life in which people do take what is concrete for them to be their form of life. And do so immediately and directly. And were going to see how that immediate and direct understanding of oneself as constituted by the ethical laws that constitute the community will eventually fracture. Because, the because is the interesting question. But somethings crazy about that immediacy. [gap] Hes thinking very fast. Probably faster than usual. Than is possible. Is at least what the project is intelligible from here?
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5. Im not sure I follow how...the problem with Spirit is that it has to be...its not phenomenological, or its not phenomenal, and it has to be. How does the fusion of an ethical experience, how does the fusion to philosophical insight become Spirit?
My claim is simply this: that the transition from reason to Spirit is one that is made on the basis of a philosophical thesis. Namely the thesis that the content which drives the moral law is itself Spiritual. So that last critique, the critique of Kant is actually not made phenomenologically. Its made behind the back of moral consciousness. Those of us seen, already having as it were...now were set up to regard abstract Kantian rationality as an abstraction, and in a way were just looking for how it is abstract in a way weve seen other forms to be abstractions from the social content. But its not a phenomenological collapse we actually find. What we find is a theoretical criticism. And people have said they find this one of the weakest moments in the text, that critique of Kants moral law. Well, it is a weak one: its perfectly gestural, he does the same thing much better in a thousand different places, since hes been making the same criticism since he was about twenty-two years old. And all his buddies have been making the same criticism. It really is very gestural. The critique of formalism. But that means it doesnt happen for natural consciousness; it happens for us, the we who have been reading the text. And Ive said that the structure of the book is always phenomenological demonstrations for a particular readership, the rhetorical question of the idealist reader. But if thats right, then Im saying this movement has been accomplished theoretically, but not phenomenologically. But if it hasnt been phenomenologically accomplished, then it doesnt refer to any possible experience anyones ever had. In which case it doesnt refer, it doesnt go through, what is claimed to be necessary for Hegel, namely that there be an experiential path by which insight is achieved into substance. And Im claiming the chapter on Spirit will give us that experiential path. Now Im simply claiming that the notion of experience that were going to, and this is just a claim now, that the actual experience, which will be experience that allows me to say, you know, to recognize myself in otherness, which means to say Im a member of Spirit, which is a philosophical insight, because Im going to say is a consequence, is a component of a kind of a very concrete kind of ethical experience. So Im saying philosophical insight into the philosophical claim that Spirit is substance ultimately is going to be derived from going through an ethical experience of some kind. And then Im going to have to be able to say, now Ive already hinted at the thought, that this looks like it must be necessary for Hegel to say. Because if Spirit is the groundtheres nothing outside Spiritand Spirit is various forms of life, and all forms of life are nothing but customs and practices, and customs and practices are forms of mutual recognition. Thats what they are. Ill say more about that as we go on. But if all of thats the case, then very unsurprisingly, insight into Spirit must be made in a mode logically compatible with it, that is Spiritually, not theoretically in the abstract sense weve been criticizing all along. Now Ive said it all again. Did that help? A bit. I mean, as I said, the actual way Im going to try to do the trick, as it were, that is, ethical insight, philosophical insight, just depends on a specific reading of the end of the chapter on Spirit. So I havent done that yet. But Im just going to try to, as it were, I want to, it seems to me even from where we are it makes sense to say that thats what we should expect to happen. Maybe Im saying too much. LIZ GOODSTEIN: Why is it that the ethical insight and philosophical insight, in order to be the same, need to have a specifically historical articulation? It seems to me, for instance, this description that you just made, with the forms of life is amenable to a kind of Wittgensteinian reading that then abstracts from history in the strong sense that Hegel wants to. Right.
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LIZ GOODSTEIN: So I think that youre making a stronger claim about the connection between metaphysical insight and philosophical insight. Yeah, I mean, one way of posing the issue a moment is to say Well, what weve got [up] to here is, you might say, a certain kind of Wittgensteinianism, although not one that Wittgenstein himself would approve of. You might say a certain philosophical appropriation of Wittgenstein whose deepest urges were very anti-philosophical. Now, the question may then be posed as to why it is we cant stop with that insight. What makes that insight itself abstract? And somebody who didnt, and heres a typical kind of complaint against Wittgenstein: people have said Wittgensteins antipathy towards philosophy doesnt realize that philosophy too is a language game, participates in forms of life, and therefore philosophical argumentation is just as legitimate as any other form of argumentation. So why is Hegel making this big deal against a purely theoretical insight into the notion of Spirit? Well, the answer has to be because of what Spirit is. And if the claim is that Spirit is not just the fact of human sociality, or the fact that I am a social being and I only get my individuality by being socialized into language and a set of practices, blah blah blah blah, how tedious. All that s true, but the point is that that must make, that s not only a fact externally, its a certain kind of claim upon me. It actually opens up the possibilities of my fundamental relationship to myself. Because thats the question weve been asking. So unless I can come to an understanding of the meaning of sociality as something that emerges in the drive to come to an understanding of the experience of myself as agent in the world. That is, unless I can understand the claim of sociality, where Im leaving the notion of claim as neutral between the ethical and the epistemic, then Ive misunderstood what that claim is. That a claim of a certain kind is being lodged. Not a mere discovery of another fact of the matter. That would be realism again. So what you have, you might say, at this juncture, is a kind of realism of Spirit which is therefore logically incompatible with the fact that were talking about Spirit. And hence the provocation, as I said, of the descriptions of Spirit. Its not accidental that he uses religious language, because he wants to make the claims of Spirit to have all the weight of religious claims, but of course to be wholly immanent. At no point in the Phenomenology is it ever even remotely plausible to think that Hegel has any theistic beliefs. The way, as weve seen, the religious comes up, at every point weve looked at so far, makes unequivocal what the metaphysics and ontology of his position are. That theres ever been a debate is one of the greatest mysteries of Hegel scholarship, I think. Although some of his later works allow the debate to happen. Maybe. I find the lectures on the Philosophy of Religion blatantly atheistic, but Im starting obviously looking askance. Does that help answer your question? Is that a better version of the thought? Or didnt I quite make it? LIZ GOODSTEIN: No, no, I think it helped. So its this thing when you said the realism of Spirit is the problem then thats Reason. Yes. That, in a sense, were still looking at Spirit from an un-Spiritual standpoint. And what we need is a Spiritual understanding of Spirit rather than saying Oh yeah, weve got some ultimate fact of the matter: there is Spirit, there is History, there is Something Else. All of which is compatible with sociology, for example, claiming its the first of all sciences, and then you generate the sociology of knowledge as the sociology of sociology, and you make that claim, right? I mean that is a certain form of sociologism. All of which Im suggesting is pressed aside by the very fact that Hegel refuses to stop at this juncture, that all we have is an abstraction. D. [4-1:02:29] Spirit: The true Spirit. The ethical order. [Greece]
1. Why the two-part division human-divine, man-woman? From when came the crazy German romanticization of Ancient Greece, Hegel is implying. The Greek state is actually a warrior state. 2. Ethical life a) human (law) light, self-consciousness
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(1) nation (universality) (a) nation (b) family (2) Man (government) (a) man (b) woman b) Divine (unwritten law, shadow, uncertainty, Being-Nature) (1) family (2) woman 3. For Hegel its a problem that the family will be the model for government. a) Family isnt educational, economic truth, though its an instance of these. Family raises individual out of nature, particularizing nature. But were then subject to natural negation, death. Preserves individuality of individual via death. 4. Suppression of individual self-consciousness in the Greek world. No individuation in Greece without death. 5. Only roles and functions in Greece, no individuals. Antigone is the first individual. 6. Action (= negativity (Greeks dont have this, just stations and duties)) a) nation (universality) b) Individual (Polynices) c) Death (pure being, nature)
X. 4/14/94
1. Hegels aesthetics is the best account of his politics. 2. individualism (dont have it yet) vs. individuality (particularity of individual) 3. Function of family a) dismisses husband-wife mutual recognition in love. The child is the truth of lovederomanticization. The ethical weight of love isnt in jouissance but in child rearing. Self-critique of his mid-90s writing. b) Death represents the possibility of their losing completely their individuality. Individuality only achieved in being lifted out of nature via ones action (death) and the action of burying. How do we make sense of this as an ethical obligation, not just a Levi-Straussian story where the necessity to bury the dead is just to serve an ideology, yielded to us by structural anthropology. 4. [4-1:25:06] Anamnestic solidarity a) This seems to be a nice moment to raise the problem of anamnestic solidarity, and the issues leading to it. Because I think that they both illuminate the issue about our relationship to the dead, to the past, and therefore to the obligation we might or might not have to the dead, and in what sense those obligations can be more than anthropological or structural-functionalist obligations. They also will begin to put a certain burden on my reading of Hegel. Because as youre probably aware, in the section on absolute knowingwhich we will talk about, if not here, then in the hereafterthat Hegel describes philosophy, the kind of philosophy hes doing, as a form of recollection. That it is the philosophy, is a certain comprehension of a recollected past. This then raises the question: What on earth does Hegel mean by recollection? b) We can raise this in two ways. I want to raise it first in the kind of classical way laid out by Christian Lenhardt in his beautiful, but his kind of now...I mean it was the only thing that Lenhardts ever done, but it was worth doing. Its called Anamnestic Solidarity and its the piece that has really kicked off the current discussion of the problem. The problem arises this way: nearly every moral philosophy and every political philosophy, above all marxist thought, intends a realization of justice. That we intend, at our most optimistic, a total emancipation of mankind. That is, it doesnt look plausible to say that justice can intend less. We may say that thats idealized, that we never achieve it, but we cant actually intend that people suffer injustice as a part of our account of justice. So any conception of justice worth having must have at least
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the horizon, one might have thought, of total emancipation. And that notion of total emancipation is an image of the solidarity of humankind. c) [4-1:27:00] We can then think of the problem of the past in relationship to the notion of perfect justice in this way. This is from Lenhardt. Lets think of ourselves as a simple structuration, as it were, of history from the perspective of an ideal of emancipation and total justice it would look like the following: that we have three sets of generations. Were using a schematization because obviously G1, G2, G3 recapitulate the past-present -future structure of temporality. Hence this language here is kind of Heideggerian jargon for those worlds which you are related to in certain ways. So we can think of ourselves as having a past of enslaved predecessors; a present of enslaved contemporarieshere were just looking at things from the point of view of the suppressed, for the momentand then finally the generation that achieves total justice, that of our emancipated successors. d) [4-1:28:00] Heres the, in very, very simplistic and bald terms, here is the problem that this raises. If G3its nice to have these because now I can pretend Im a real philosopher and talk with symbols and numbersif G3 truly realizes a state of emancipation, that is, to use the language of the early Marx, that there is a total recovery of Man, and where it looks plausible to say that the total recovery of Man out of alienation and domination would be the total redemption of humanity then it looks as if this realization would entail forgetting G2 and G1. The thought here is that, to quote Lenhardt, the human species can only actualize itself when it overcomes the debilitating ballast of remembrance, that is, when it forgets its historical genesis [cf. Nietzsches active forgetting.] The progressive, forward-looking humanist who deems himself inspired by Marx projects a state of affairs in which men can enjoy without remorse, guilt, or sense of indebtedness the fruits of the becoming of history, that the becoming of history has bequeathed to him. Now think about all the pictures youve ever heard about a redeemed future including Marxs own about being a critical critic, and fishing, and that stuff. This is deeply problematic for the following reason. On this account, G1 and G2 become merely means, pure instruments for the realization of G3. But then G3 is logically equivalent to past and present oppressors who have built their happiness on G1 and G2. Now should I say that in English rather than Gs? The thought here is just that if the realization of this state of affairs is absolutized, that is, we just enter into this utopiathe utopia, you might say, of postmodernismthat wants to have the past as merely a set of things to be arranged and played with in order to give something [], then G2 and G1all the misery of the pastindeed, above all the very fact that these folk, the enslaved contemporaries, and those who struggled struggled in order to redeem their fellows, and redeem the past, all these become mere instruments and means to this final state. [the people of the past are with us, but as memory. Cf. Carruthers.] But if thats right, if the happiness of the utopian realization has those enslaved contemporaries and enslaved predecessors as mere means, then they are no different than the enslavers who also have their happiness on the basis of the denial of the worth of the claims of the enslaved present and past. Hence theres no logical difference between the nasty capitalist or the slave owner and the liberated person of the communist future in their relationship to the activity of oppression. e) [4-1:30:45] The first person to notice this problem, who really thought about itI mean Marx noticed it, he wasnt unaware of itbut the first person to thematize it was Walter Benjamin. This is a real problem for all materialists, for those of us who think there really isnt a hereafter. If youre a Christian you can just put cotton and wool in your ears and ignore what I have to say because its not going to be relevant because you know the enslaved, theyre OK in heaven or wherever. One of my closest friends, Robert Bernasconi, thinks that this is why all secularism is false. He thinks this is the nail in the coffin of all secularism. Because you cant deal with the fact of death. This is what Benjamin had in mind when he said that every single document of culture, every trophy of culture is equally one of barbarism. Because every document of cultureand then he meant this to point to this problembecause it goes if every
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document of culture is one of barbarismthe great art, the great paintings and all thatare equally documents of barbarism. Its just this thought, this problem, that leads Benjamin to the idea that the past must be conceived of as unfinished. Its just that thought that the past must be conceived of as unfinished that is impossible to think within the confines of rationally progressive conceptions of history. Thats really his objection to Marx: because whether its marxian or liberal, if you have a progressive conception of history, then the very notion of progress entails the forgetting, i.e., the repression of the unjust past. The unjust past becomes just the means for progress. It was too bad there was that unjust past, that people died and were murdered and all that, but, thanks to your death, things are pretty hunky dory here. Therefore he has to conceive of looking at history this is what motivates Benjamins thought then, that we have to look not merely at the documents of progress, but at all those scattered those ruins that in that progress have been left behind, buried. You might say the history of the repressed. Those, he says, are awaiting redemption. He thinks they have the powerful ability, were we to dig back into the past and go after them and yank them out of their place for a logical reason, that is, a reason that Adorno also makes, namely all suffering, they both think, is indexically bound to a future in which you would not be [present]. But thats something that the suffering itself cannot speak; thats the job of the materialist historian. So you yank these things out and they are going to be the source of another relationship to history to break open the continuum of historyso-called progressand to realize it. Hence the thought is that history or historical thoughtand if you actually read the Passagenwerke, that crazy last effort of Benjamins, all those are simply those kinds of documents, those little bits fragments in need of redemption. Thats what are being collected up ecumenically [?]. The thought here then is history changes now from science to the activity of history, changes from science to politics. It becomes a political act of solidarity as a form of writing and thought, for Benjamin. The best short account of all this is in The Collector which generates this problem and which really begins the debate because theres a reply to that essay by Horkheimer. f) [4-1:34:05] Horkheimer, in a letter to Benjamin written in 1937, says the following: the claim that history is not closed, the fundamental claim that Benjamin thinks we must make, is idealistic, says Horkheimer, if the closedness of history is not included with it. Past injustices are over and done with. The murdered really are murdered. In the end, Benjamins claim is theological. If one is to take the unclosedness seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment. My own thinking is still too contaminated with materialism for that. And then in something of Horkheimer whose origin I dont know, he writes: What happened to those human beings who perished does not have any part in the future. They will never be called forth to be blessed in eternity. Nature and society have done their work on them. [I think the image is almost like the birds doing their work on Polynices.] And the idea of the Last Judgment in which the infinite yearning of the oppressed is taken up once again is only a remnant from primitive thought which denied the negligible role of the human species in natural history and humanized the universe. Horkheimer didnt stop there, and worried about this problem until the end of his life. Benjamin, at this juncture, this is really the origin of the more theological feeling one has in reading the Benjamin of the late 30s above all the Theses on the Philosophy of History. g) [4-1:35:42] ROBERTS: Isnt Horkheimer sort of misreading him a little bit? I mean, I dont remember the exact formulation, but it seems like what Benjamin is saying is not that history is not closed, but that history can never be closed. Doesnt he say that all moments of the past have to be redeemed at some point? And that suggests a totally different logic. Its not that the materialist historian is just going to find one repressed moment, but that this task is kind of infinite. (1) Oh, it is kind of infinite, but theres also, uh, that they all need redemption and the question is: Is there a word or a language or an adequate way of thinking about this relationship to the past that is not the language of redemption? What kind of language do
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we need? And what here seems to me clear is that Benjamin did think of the problem as arising as a problem of redeeming that past. Redemption may be the wrong languageI think it isbut its very hard to know what the right language is. This is why I said by raising the problem the way I intend to, I hope to expose it and make life really difficult for myself. h) MARTIN: I think that he does misread him in the sense that he indexes him on the Last Judgment. Because in a way what Benjamin offers is a different structure that kind of escapes in some degree this pattern youve described. Because he suggested that what you need is a structure of hypocatastasis, which he talks about in the storyteller essay. Each point of the past, each part of oppression is tied to some future event. But that inscription presents that through an alternative kind of theological history that doesnt close itself at some horizon of the Last Judgment. Its constantly ongoing. So its not in the sense of the Last Judgment in which every point is emancipated, but that theres a sort of alternative sequence in which those parts of the past are constantly being restored. But theyre never adding up into a closure in which theres a total round of emancipation. Hypocatastasis in which all the souls are redeemed is never one in which its fully realized. (1) Oh, no, but all youre doing is making the unclosedness of the past permanent. That doesnt solve the theological problem. Nor did Benjamin think it did. Benjamin replies to Horkheimer, in these words: the corrective to Horkheimers line of thought lies in the reflection that history is not just a science but a form of recollection. Eingedenken as well. Eingedenken is a very Benjaminian concept. i) [4-1:37:20] What the science has established, recollection can modify. Recollection can make the incompletehappinessinto something finished. Suffering into something incomplete. That is theology. But we experience recollection as something which forbids us to conceive history as thoroughly atheological. Just as we dare not attempt to write it in terms of immediately theological concepts. So he just generates the thingand thats why Benjamins tough aporetically. In other words either we cant make sense that we have a relationship to the past, so we must think of our relationship to history theological, that it cant be atheological, because the notion of unfinished in this is necessary if were not to have a purely spectatorial relationship to the past. But conversely, and I think this is the point that both of you were trying to make, it cant be neatly theological. Hes not, as it were, saying that I know that this activity of Eingedenken [eingedenk = mindful of] is equivalent to full theological redemption of the past. Rather its as if (hes gesturing at this point in time) we have to, uh, there has to be a unity which is also, I think, very Hegelianof remembrance and insight, and if theres going to be, if that notion of remembrance and insight are to syncopate, which is then were saying would be a non-scientistic relationship to history, then we have to drop the distinction between the theological and the non-theological. j) [4-1:38:35] Thats one way of raising the problem. Of just raising the problem. The second way would be with reference to the debate/conflict over the status of German history that arose in the late 70s and 80s. Here we can think about it in these terms, which I think are important, give us a kind of specificity to the problem rather than a generality. Namely, the moral challenge of the idea of collective guilt implied by a present generation having some relationship to past victims. The thought here isobviously the debate arose around German historiography and the relationship to the Holocaust, and what the obligation, if there was one, was involved in the present generations relationship to that past. But it could be raised as locally for us in a book by Sheldon Wolin that I discovered on David Cohens bookshelf. And I recommend that everyone have a look at David Cohens bookshelf. They are fabulous. He has probably a thousand books in there, and every one deserves reading. I havent read all of them, but he has a wonderful, wonderful little library in his office. And in it I discovered a book by of all people Sheldon Wolin. I say of all people because Wolin is a political theorist who really was the papa for the current generation of radical political theorists, people like Bill [], Tracy Strong, the people behind Political Theory, but is often thought to have been left behind
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by their advances. But in this fairly recent bookI think 88 or 89I think called something like Past and Present he explicitly raises the question, making no reference to critical theory or the Frankfurt School, about corporatist America and the fact that American forgetfulness of, above all, the Civil War, the divided and conflicted natureand of course the origins of the Civil War, he says you cant remember the Civil War because if you did you may have to think about slavery, and then you may have to think differently about and he then tries to generate a distinction between polities that are political communities of memory versus those that are, say, political communities of principal. So hes doing a certain kind of critique of, lets call it, current liberalism. k) [4-1:40:33] The thought here is that, you may say that theres aand I want to use this wordyou may say that theres a special responsibility between past and present that may be thought about in terms of a debt to the past. It seems to me that its only in terms of the notion of a certain indebtedness to the past that we can make any sense at all of the thought, and this is actually the nub of the problem in the historians debate, about whether or not there is a moral content of collective memory. Thats the fundamental issue. Whether remembering, and therefore having a certain memory, and recalling certain events, having a memorial relation such that a reflective awareness, a remembering of those events, is constitutive of existing social and political reflection, and then for reflection on the kinds of institutions we ought to have, whether theres a moral content to that claim. Again, this looks like a question of a certain sign of solidarity with the dead. [cf. Nietzsche, 2nd essay of Genealogy on fundamental indebtedness.] l) Now this arises in a neat way for Habermas precisely because he has his notion of communicative rationality is past indifferent. It is about: what makes a moral norm worthy is is it acceptable to all those who can accept its consequences and side effects for all their activities? Thats principally it [?]. Done. In a half second. You dont want to hear the whole thing. The person who first accused Habermas of really going wrong here in a very interesting book was the theologian Herman Peukert in a book whose title I should know, and will retrieve for you this second: Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action. Its translated by Jim Bowman, and it was published by MIT in 1984. Its a very, very interesting book which kind of links Habermas to liberation theology. Peukerts line is going to be just a reworking of the Benjaminian problem for Habermass philosophy. Roughly, quoting Peukert: How can one retain the memory of the conclusive, irretrievable loss of the victims of the historical process to whom one owes ones entire happiness, and still be happy, still find ones own identity? If, for the sake of ones own happiness and identity this memory is banished from consciousness, is this not tantamount to the betrayal of the very solidarity by which, alone, one is able to discover oneself? That leads Peukert very interestingly into the idea that history can only be done as an act of despair; he takes the bull by the horns. I wont go into the fact that Habermas really gets caught on this because on the one hand he wants to insist upon the moral content of collective memory, but everything, in all his engagements with Benjamin, he cant because thats outside of his notion of the moral. That is rehearsed in a paper that Ive just read by Max Pensky: On the Use and Abuse of Memory: Habermas, Anamnestic Solidarity. That appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism #13, 1989. m) One furtherjust a thoughttoo much self-advertisingthat one of the things that I try to do in my Habermas book, without direct reference to this material, though, is to argue that the best way to think about the meaning of universalistic claims is to think of them as the consequences of the overcoming of past injustice.That is, the meaning of universality, I claim, is substantive in the sense that what we mean is that moral norms are applicable to all. Not acceptable to all; thats crazy Habermasian communication. n) My argument is that the meaning of universalism for us is that moral predicates are applicable to all, and I see the historical process of the...[gap]...as precisely the struggles to say
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that the restriction of the application of moral predicates, civil rights and the like is unjust. And that our notion of justice is formed by the continual overcoming of these unjust restrictions as revealed in precisely these historical acts of repression and the activity of overcoming the repression. So my thesis would be that our universalistic norms actually have memory of repression as their substantive content. o) And thats something I do sketchily in a section of the book, but would want to argue that would be the way I would want to begin to go with relationship to the question of universalism. Not to the question of memoryIm leaving that as still a problembut I want to claim that as the right way to begin thinking about how we could begin thinking about universalism while remaining within the materialist and the moral problematic. Let me stop there. Ive talked nervously, depressingly, for an hour. [Campanile tower tolls twelve oclock.] (1) MARTIN: The bell tolls. (2) It tolls for thee! 5. [4-1:45:00] 6. What is the meaning of the relation between the written and unwritten law? How do we know about indebtedness? What is the relation of the individual to the two laws? 7. Hegels fundamental criticism of the Greek polis is that its only in death that individuality is recognized. So theres a suppression of the individual. 8. Deeds are acts done in accordance with standing requirements for their performance. 9. #464 a) Destruction of the polis. Fate has the moments of divine and human law. The repressions that constitute the polis are swallowed up. The destruction of Creon, Antigone is the destruction of ancient Greece. Tragedy is the reconciliation of the poliss difficulties. b) We will pass over into absolute being-for-self that is absent, but announced in Antigone. c) Greece is between origin as ideal and as historical quest. d) In Greece we first experience the death of God (Homer to Aristophanes; Socrates as first individual), and this opens the possibility of history. e) Can the deed be read retroactively as necessary in what was previously a world without agents? Transition from #463 to #464 cannot be a destruction. #463 is restaged in #464, but add the deed. In the transgression, the deed becomes action. It creates a relation between subject and object, i.e., its negativity and sets Antigone apart from the world she inhabits. 10. #468 a) Its only through the act of transgression that she individuates herself. b) How is Hegel going to sustain this necessity for transgressive negativity. c) [Q: Is Antigone, for us, a political actor or an actor whose act produces politics (antagonism)?] Collapses easy distinction between religious and political. For us, we see her deed as deed become action. She doesnt see it this way. d) Both laws are irreconcilable because theyre indifferent to the individual. e) We cant read Antigones act as ontological [why not?]. f) Theres a natural basis to this whole state of affairs. Its no accident that shes a woman. The problem isnt family and state as such, but family and state as determining sexuality. (Cf. end of #465, #468 As regards content..., #473, #476.) 11. #476 a) Antigone is the manifestation of the lack of space for her in the polis since she gets her ethical substance from her gender. b) The whole point is that gender is incompatible with negativity. You cant base ethical on gender difference and thats Greeces downfall. This isnt Hegels misogyny but his critique of Greece, of Creon. c) The question of sexual difference is an overt theme of the play. Internal to the logic of the play, no misreading on Hegels part. (Cf. lines 60, 525, 579, 665, 740, 746 of Antigone).
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d) Martin Donougho The Woman in White: On the Reception of Hegels Antigone Owl of Minerva 21: 1 1989 answers objection to Hegel. Mills Woman, Nature, and Psyche four objections. 12. In trying to rationalize that Antigones deed has the qualities we need for our purposes, the brother-sister connection is perfect since its devoid of passion and parent-child duty. This keeps it as abstract obligation. 13. Tragedy as aesthetic object is in the chapter on religion. Not an exegesis, but used strategically. 14. Creon only becomes prideful as a consequence to Antigones principled disobedience. Before Antigone, Creon thinks he can be transgressed only for money. 15. The heart of Hegels claim is that the split is logically unavoidable between Creon and Antigone. There can be no going back to the status quo.
XI. 4/19/94
1. Form of knowing projects concept of an object. Subjectivity is this comparison. Form of consciousness is the connection between these two. a) But now these forms of consciousness turn out to be abstractions of Spirit. Hegels methodology is itself an abstraction from Spirit. b) Antigone generates the dislocations that require a new form of (Greek) life. c) Hegels methodology is what happens as the consequence of Antigone. So its not abstract but substantial. What was methodological becomes historical. The critique of abstraction in the move from Reason to Spirit applies to the method itself. 2. Contradiction is always ethical. It always has to do with finding an adequate place for an individual or others. a) Ethical = metaphysical in the sense that the poliss failure isnt due to Antigone or Creons role-failure, but that her position disrupts the whole ethical life structure. b) The notion of substance requires a certain ontological relation of self, society, and this has normative force. A failure here is death to the culture. c) [5-0:35:50] Destiny is the causal efficacy of the Substance, normatively structured, reflecting back on part and whole (the return of the repressed) [the causality of fate] [normatively structured = substance]. d) Natural causality vs. destiny which only takes on causality in virtue of their suppression. But we dont want to generate historicism. That this is all supposed to be the history of Spirit is not historical. 3. [5-0:41:35] Marx thinks that Hegel is saying that the inner contradiction of Greek life caused it to collapse. We dont care about what really brought down Greek life. But the question is whether that form of life could be adequate in its own terms. Theres luck and contingency in historical occasions. a) What we learn from Rome is something Antigone couldnt have: legal person as holder of property. Genderless, raceless, classless. The question now is whether we can keep a notion of a genderless person without a particular notion of private property. b) Can the kind of forms of historical necessity avoid the charge of a bolder teleology? What is it to have a history? What is the metaphysics of history? If we have to know ourselves as Spirit, the I which is a we, Spirit knows itself: these three are necessary to learn what it is to call ourselves spiritual beings. c) Its not an idealist process because of the causality of fate. 4. The collapse of the Roman world derived from the observation that the legal person itself was grounded in absolute contingencies. a) Stoicism resulted from the interiority Rome created as part of its legal person. The interiority that Rome was ripe for allowed Christianity to kick in. Christianity was, at first, all interior.
B. Self-Alienated Spirit. Culture.
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1. [5-0:51:10] Its here and just here that Hegel talks about Spirits being self-alienated. Alienation doesnt belong to the metaphysics of Spirit. We participate in forms of life that arent just alienation of ourselves. (Anti-Whitehead) 2. Hes discussing Europe 1600 +- 75. Emergence of (absolutist) state, but with its contrasting other (civil society). State vs. civil society is the noble-base dialectic. The movement is like Marxs in The Jewish Question. a) The modern epoch is a coming to grips (for Hegel) with this relation (Philosophy of Right). b) Logic of nobility is troubled. Derives from late Middle Age structuration. Nobility is driven by its selfless action. But honor requires recognition, so honor is pursued by someone. So honor is a self-interested goal and isnt pursued selflessly (#503-506). c) The whole ethos of the nobility that was based on death and war appears as groundless as idealism. The state is nonetheless recognized as authoring what it is to be noble or not. d) Must find a language of recognition rather than an abstract structural grammar. hence the royal court where the nobles were seeking to achieve recognition by counseling and flattering. e) Linguistic forms are deployed as the necessary medium for entering into social relations (#508). f) Self-consciousness (apperception) to attain to actuality. There must be a mediation interval to interiority for interiority to be mediated through and through. 3. #508 a) The notion of I must put you in relation to language in order to allow you to individuate yourself, but that individuation is possible only because it allows each individual (its perspectival). But since each individual speaks it as a whole, there must be reciprocity (each must be able to do it) and structural asymmetry. Its only in view of that structure that language permits (universality and appropriability) that are the conditions of possibility of ones being an I. b) Hegel can only give language this weight because it phenomenally appears. This isnt a theoretical observation. 4. #510 a) What consciousness lacks is the transfer of the state powers power to it. Groupies of power werent empowered. b) The states authority is groundless, which causes the inherent nihilism of the absolutist state. Thats its problem, and is analyzed in Rameaus nephew. He has to recover a phenomenological movement by which the groundlessness of state power is revealed. Its out of the groundlessness itself that modernitys project of grounding arisessource of enlightenment. c) [5-1:16:25] Different from pomo; modernity throws culture, individuals back on themselves in self-grounding. Desire for immanent, reflexive authorization of the norms of cognition and practice. Logical consequence of the problems resulting from the attempt at individual grounding. 5. [5-1:18:25] #511-#514: The noble realizes his flatterys a performance, so detaches himself from it as theatrical; courtly intrigue. 6. #516-#518: There are fundamental ways or life to be choice worthy under some horizon of what choiceworthiness might mean. Every form of life has criteria for these. Culture is now set free from Bildung, from forming yourself. Pure (empty) culture: court to salon, which arose from interstices of court. 7. [5-1:26:55] #521 a) It exists in the universal talk and destructive judgement which strips of their significance all those moments which are supposed to count as the true being and as actual members of the whole, and is equally this nihilistic game which it plays with itself [i.e. without constraint]. This judging and talking is, therefore, what is true and invincible, while it overpowers everything; it is solely with this alone that one has truly to do with in this actual world.
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b) So weve got a self that is at a complete ironic distance from its actual performances. But what Hegels revealingand I think is there in Rameaus Nephewis that the nephews own ironic relationship is itself, as irony always is for Hegel (see the opening to the lecture on aesthetics), itself a self-disruption. That is, irony is always an attempt at objectivity by selfdistancing that collapses by presupposing a place of authority that it doesnt really have access to. Should I say that again? I actually had a big argument with Cascardi over this. He was saying oh isnt this like irony. Of course for Hegel irony is the bad guy. Always. And its this: irony, first of alland for those who are didactic among you, I have a whole chapter on this in my Lukcs bookirony is a movement whereby you distance yourself and say that your actual claims, self1, is not who you really are. So thats the self-distancing move. Now that selfdistancing move, of course, is just the relationship between the transcendental ego and the empirical ego. It is, that is, the move of not identifying the self with any of its actual claims and propositions. Now for that to be a claim to objectivity, namely, to put the self above each of its claims because each of them is conditional, that presupposes that the conditionality that is supposed t vitiate the blindness of what goes on at level 1, is made good by a transparency in the transcendental ego. But the value of that claim, that is, the worth of this is wholly parasitic of its not being that, its not being blinded at that level. to say had no authority. Its a pretense of distance without substance. And in that sense you can only be ironic, I mean, think about, I mean this is why I hate Jane Austen. In England, by the waythis is probably OK in America in England hating Jane Austen is like, well, I cant think of anything worse. Its much, much worse than hating the monarchy and things like that. I mean Jane Austen is it. But Jane Austen, I think, is smug. And shes a smug ironist, that is, the notion of irony is always, and ironic comment, always depends upon being able to discriminate between those who know and those who dont know. So ironys supposed to work because for some audience, theyre going to take the comment literally. And only those in the know...its an appearance-reality distinction.
LIZ GOODSTEIN: And youre claiming its a disavowal of the blindness? Its a disavowal of the blindness of self1, sure. Its always a claim of transcendence. LIZ GOODSTEIN: But in what sense disavowal? Its a refusal to identify your true self with the identity of the empirically conditioned. LIZ GOODSTEIN: And your problem with that is that its also a move of exclusion. Necessarily. So it both has a pretense to transparency... MELANI GUINN: Doesnt that presume that the ironist is in control of the irony? Yeah, but Im saying that its hollow. MELANI GUINN: But youre claiming that an ironist always has a claim to objectivity. No, irony is a way of making a claim to objectivity without having any evidence. That is, its the separation of those who understand the irony from those who dont which authorize the objectivity which is being claimed for the comment. MARK ROBERTS: So the paradigm of this would be Socratic irony, where Socrates says All knowledge is virtue, but I dont have knowledge. Right. LIZ GOODSTEIN (to MELANI GUINN): Push the Socrates problem. MELANI GUINN: Yeah. Well I have to think about this. But why cant it be pure play with no, I mean why cant it be a nihilistic irony that everyone admits cant be received properly and it cant be intended clearly. Oh, but thats fine, as long as youre happy for nihilism to....Thats my claim: irony can only be nihilism. MELANI GUINN: So when it claims objectivity, thats the violent move. Yes, but irony has been the method of the twentieth centurys claim to objectivity. Almost every...
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MELANI GUINN: Its also been a subversive act as well. But Im claiming its hollow subversion. Im questioningI know this is uncomfortablebut Im saying that irony is, despite its subversive movement, it is a subversive movement thats groundless. Its based on mere solidarity of a community of knowers with themselves. Thus my hatred for Jane Austen; thats why I said that the novels are simply smug. Now of course they have to do with having the right kind of sensibility and all that, and gee Im sensible too, but its structurally smug because its objectivity is based on that double movement and separation. LIZ GOODSTEIN: So can I push the other side? Yeah. LIZ GOODSTEIN: So the problem with Socratic irony is whether thats a claim to objectivity, or whether theres not some further movement going on. And I think maybe what Melanis getting at is your claim that all irony is an objectivity is knotted to this limited definition of the problem. Because if what irony is as not in this first order, but as a second order practice is a way of signifying a skeptical position... MELANI GUINN: Right. LIZ GOODSTEIN: ...than as a practice, that it has perhaps a different kind of structure. MELANI GUINN: Yeah, Im thinking of like the Judith Butler notion of irony as an unearthing of repetitive...and certainly it has to...she insists that it has no claim to objectivity. But thats my skepticism about that kind of skepticism. How can you ironize something and subvert it, and yet claim that theres no objectivity? MELANI GUINN: Well, you cant be sure youve subverted it. LIZ GOODSTEIN: No, but he means just a weaker claim that if you formulate propositionally or in any other kind of way at all, then it falls into this structure. It seems like the interesting problem is whether theres a way to talk about second order tropes such that you get a reflectedness of irony upon itself. You talk about the Socratic case for instance about whether there are other epistemological problems that arise at that level and not at the level of... I want to do it the other way. Ill come back to this next week because my reading of consciousness has a lot to do with the problem of irony. But what I want to claim is thatand this is both with and against de Manis that the structure of irony is inseparable from the distinction between transcendental and empirical self, and that irony is a way of sustaining that structure. But if we think of that structure itself as a misunderstanding of where the transcendental ego is simply the place holder for what were going to be looking at in a moment (but probably not today), namely negativity, which is what irony is an expression of, the power of, then I want to say that irony will always end up as an ideology of an illusory separating out of false and true selves. Hence, I want to say, and this is why I say its an inversion of de Man, because de Man thinks its the trope of irony and language that begets the true self, transcendental and empirical structure. MARK ROBERTS: That begets the true self? Well, yeah. That begets the split. The whole line here is that self is merely a trope. And the best trope is the ironic trope because it is the movement of selfing, for de Man. And since de Man is a nihilistbut a very interesting kind of nihilist, I mean, hes intentionally a nihilist. Im very fond of de Man despite these comments. Then Im saying that, and my reason for worrying about Liz is that now Im saying that it seems to me that you cant hold onto the trope of irony we cant hold onto the trope of irony: I dont know about any other epoch. There maybe other ironies in other epochs, but for us irony is attached to this, and that Im saying is going to be problematic. And thus if were unhappy with this, then we cant hold on to the use of irony. MARK ROBERTS: Im confused. I thought that he liked irony because it seemed to be a kind of, in a way, a kind of realistic perspective on our relationship as selves with some kind of totality.
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Like he talks about Schlegels irony and says well Schlegel sees irony in relationship to the development to the modern novel and he likes irony because the sort of ironic moment is the sort of recognition that the world of fiction, the world of the self as a fiction, cannot be reconciled with some empirical world. And that thats an interesting moment over and against the sort of romantic idea that the two can somehow be reconciled. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Im not disagreeing with that. Im not saying thats not what he says. What Im saying is that the blindness-insight structure that he holds as the movement of the ironic self, that is the movement form blindness into insight as process, he thinks is the self understood, I mean, he thinks simply irony is the best trope. Self is a construction of language; language is always rhetorical; the highest trope of language under conditions of modernity is irony. MARK ROBERTS: because the two never close. Because the two never close. Right. And Im saying that the two that never close is already an illusory conception of the self. So Im letting the conception of self drive my very Rousseau and puritanical critique of irony contest his celebration of it. I too am interested in openness, but not ironic openness. Hmm, made some new enemies today, Another good day at the farm. MELANI GUINN: I guess I dont see how you can disagree, I mean I still dont see how you can disagree that the self isnt just a trope. I mean that the self is constructed. I woke up this morning and didnt feel like a trope. MELANI GUINN: I feel like a trope. You do, huh? MELANI GUINN: Mm hmm. Bad day at the farm. People do things tropes dont. In other words Im not, uh, it just seems to me that you cant absorb everything we want to say about persons into structures of language. Structures of language. That just seems to me bizarre. MELANI GUINN: Oh, I see. Of course Im sayingIve already arguedno self without relationship to language. Relationship to language. MELANI GUINN: It just seems to come back to what you mean, what is meant by language. How broad that gets. It seems like for de Man thats a very broad category. No, I think de Man has, well, first of all de Man is just a pretty sophisticated Heideggerian whos interested...this movement is just the movement to authenticity. This [diagram] is just the they-self and this [diagram] is just the authentic self. De Man is much more closer to Heidegger than Derrida, and is very interested in preserving a Heideggerian notion of authenticity as simply taking here...and a notion of groundlessness the Heideggerian notion of nothing and groundlessness becomes language and fiction for de Man. So the whole things a rewriting of Heidegger. And a brilliant one. LIZ GOODSTEIN: Can you say more about the language as fiction part? Because it doesnt have a ground, thats why metaphor as figure is prior to assertion. Thats the sense of language as fiction. So de Manian deconstruction is the attempt to showquite the opposite of Derridean deconstructionthat literary discourses have a will to fictionality which is their authenticity. While, say, philosophers who want to speak the truth think that theres, you know, well hes worried about the same idealist problematic about ultimate truth and matter-offactness. Taking the notion of groundlessness in a very Heideggerian way, he then linguisticizes the Heideggerian structure, where the notion of the nothing of existence is that existence is linguistic. Good, late Heidegger. Language is metaphorical. Boom, and then you get authenticity. Now reading, a very interesting movement, now reading early Heidegger into this late linguistic structure. So fiction as not deceived about its abysmal possibilities of performance
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is a movement into authenticity as opposed to philosophical discourse. Its a quite brilliant argument, I think. [gap] Much more, I think, because hes worried about the problem of authenticity, which is to say hes worried about the problem of self-grounding, and always thinking that we must be in relationship to that, I think of him as a deeper thinker than Derrida. Although obviously Derrida is a clever person. But cleverness isnt everything. Thank God, or Im in real trouble. OK. Well weve wandered way off and its nearly two oclock, so it doesnt seem. I will start with faith and pure insight. I think youve got this idea of The disruptive consciousness, however, is consciousness of the perversion, and, moreover, of the absolute perversion. Thats the ultimate nihilism. Beautiful. I like the account of this, of all the accounts, I like Stanley Rosens account of his in his book on Hegel [Hegel: An Introduction]. Rosen has a real feel for perversion and nihilism. Its where hes happiest: in diagnosing it. Well its only because some of us feel nervous, because were close to it. Stanley because hes a platonist doesnt worry about it and can revel in it. LIZ GOODSTEIN: Id like to know why, just a little bit more about your definition of nihilism. Because it seems to me that whats happening in this, not so much because Im coming from a position of disagreement, but because it seems to me Hegels describing particular things in this passage, and Im not sure why this reversal and this language of dispersion and this particular doubling should be nihilisms. Is this chapter somehow more central to your understanding of modern consciousness? Is that the basis for your distinction? I think so. I mean I do want to put a certain kind of weight on this in relationship to us. And I want to do so because it seems to me that the experience of nihilism is of course the experience, in the most technical Nietzschean terms, of the highest values a) devaluing themselves processually and hence b) becoming empty or worthless, that is we say we have them, but cant as it were believe in their worth, goodness or value. It seems to me that what is pretty interesting, and something that Hegel couldnt know, is that as far as he was concerned the history of German idealism was a moment of the consolidation of value, and the overcoming of the nihilism problematic of the early modernity. My suggestion then, and my way of reading him this way, and in this I guess Im like Stanley, is that I see our relationship to culture, and our culture as much more like the culture of that aristocratic world than like the culture that Hegel was addressing in his contemporaries who thought there was, you know, the truth of the French Revolution they needed appropriation, no one doubted that the French Revolution was a great world historical achievement. The question was: How do we make good that achievement without the Terror? That was both true in France, Germany, England, everywhere, and the American Revolution went on. Now it just seems to me that the way I have of, when I read this section, it just seems to me Im rereading, thats why my gestures to the West Side and all that were not meant ironically but directly in the sense that. So I take the problem of nihilism in a austerely Nietzschean definition. And Im claiming so does Hegel, and Im simply saying that not for the sake of the argument of the text, but with respect to our relationship to that argument to see this as the moment of nihilism. It seems to me important, which goes exactly to your question about irony, because my, and you know people have different takes on a culture. Some people think of our culture as on the one hand this closed, authoritarian, dominating sphere full of repression and values that nobody wants. And folk like me see the dominant culture as the emptiness of values and their mobilization in a series of codes, plays and the like, that is, selfconscious postmodernism as the most reflective truth of our culture, which I read as logically or extensionally equivalent to the disruptive consciousness of Rameaus nephew. Or, if you want to, as it were, toss a coin: Baudrillard or Rameaus nephew. I dont see the difference.
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MELANI GUINN: But Nietzsche has two nihilisms, right? Active and passive. MELANI GUINN: No, playful and oppressive. No, theres no play in Nietzsche. This is just a nonsense. LIZ GOODSTEIN: You just lost the rest of the audience. Nietzsche was the least playful person in the world. MELANI GUINN: Think of the difference between The Gay Science and Zarathustra. Zarathustra wants to learn how to dance because he wants to overcome a certain weight. But to overcome that is to appropriate eternal return, which has all the weightiness of Kants Categorical Imperative, but without any criterion! MELANI GUINN: Well thats the bad nihilism. No, thats the good! That is eternal return. MELANI GUINN: No, thats the bad. The animals play and Zarathustra says youve missed the point. No, the animals are all symbolic... MELANI GUINN: Well it seems as if the animals are playing and are happy in their nihilism, and Zarathustra says Youve missed the point if you think this is happy. Whereas The Gay Science is where its pure play. Theres no pure play in Nietzsche. This is a Nietzsche Ive never... MELANI GUINN: Theres the split in our department right there: irony and seduction. Im interested in both, but I think youd have a hard time finding a Nietzsche who had any conception of play. The notion of play is a figure of nonrationalism in Nietzsche. But Nietzsches interested in the question of grounding. And the notion of the relationship of the will to power and eternal return is of course just meant to be a repetition of the relationship between Willkr and Wille in Kant. Which is to say its meant to be an account of the possibility of self grounding. Its how a life can become worthy intrinsically. And therefore Nietzsches not of the belief that once we get rid of the bad old tradition, then well simply discover were OK and happy. Thats why he distinguishes between passive and active nihilism. So there is a second nihilism, but its the nihilism as the nil has to be activated into an affirmative life form. And that is the question in Deleuze of double affirmation. Your notion of play is single affirmation. But unless you affirm the activity of affirming, then you are just an animal. And Nietzsches question is: Can we have a reflective relationship to affirmation itself, which is simply the movement of life. And thats why all affirmation is double. About that it seems to me that Deleuzes book is exquisite. And you find the same thing when you look at, if you want to read, the same thing secretly is going on in Derrida. He says theres hermeneutics and theres double hermeneutics. Because if all history has been interpretation, then knowing thats not a change. Rather, we have to affirm the interpretation that has always already been happening. The question, of course, is How do you do that? Thats Nietzsches question. XII. 4/21/94
1. [5-1:43:15] We left off with a skeptical view of culture, and this may be like our own situation. But we have no French Revolution or Napoleon. 2. French Revolution was ambiguous: Terror vs. moral impulse. Action: guillotine was wrong. Spectator: enthusiasm for guillotine. 3. #527 a) Skepticism about culture bred a new type of religiosity, desire for spiritual substance. Pascals Penses better than Kierkegaard. b) (Passionate naturalism)-enlightenment: commitment to unbiased thought and observation. French philosophes were naturalists.
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c) The fundamental Enlightenment gesture is ideology critique (Marx: ideology critique begins with the critique of religion). And the critique of religion begins with Enlightenment. (1) Critique never escapes from what were going to see as the problematics, the presumption of, ideology critique. d) Faith and pure insight share: (1) To know anything is to submit it to authoritative grounds that are not dependent on any transcendent source for its authentication. The accessibility of the Absolute is dependent on my turning. Hence the wager, the leap of faith. The leap must precede any relation to the object. These must precede any relation to the Absolute. (2) To know anything is to possess universal grounds for belief. (Now no ones inherently a slave, etc.) Universalism is part of the three monotheistic religions. (3) Its implied by the reductionism of the New Science. e) The notion of faith provides a knowledge of substance and concept, but via conception essence as beyond intellection. Pure insight is a form of intellection which requires whatever appears to meet the standards of a wholly negatively defined conception of rationality. Its as if everyone from the Enlightenment were from Missouri: Show me! f) Hegel is setting up his own version of Kants first critique: (1) We have pure concepts (pure insight) which are empty without essences. (2) Pure essences (intuitions, faith) which are blind without concepts. g) Whats driving this whole section forward is the thesis that faith and pure insight are one, or two halves of an integral freedom that do not add up. Letter to Adorno regarding the difference between high art and popular art. (1) This is the first enactment of Hegels speculation and speculative unity. (2) Whats driving us forward is the thesis that pure insight and faith are One, or: two halves of an integral freedom that dont add up. (3) thought and being (4) Faith(Hegelian) substance, insightsubjectivity => anticipating: Subject and Substance are One.Spirit. Spirit appearing here in a dirempted form. h) Pure insight is a drive for universality, challenging every content to meet its standard of rationality. 4. Enlightenment vs. New Science (has content) a) The Enlightenment as a cultural project: make lessons of New Science into cultural reality. b) How does Enlightenment present itself as spiritual vocation, not just rationality? You have to have something to be skeptical about: religion. So its negative. c) Deleuze-Guattari: if you decode, youre left with materialist base. Degree zero of allegory. The figure of figurality. (1) Hegel: youre left with nothing. d) Faith, then, is cited by Enlightenment as a realm of error. 5. [5-1:57:40] Faith cant withstand pure insight. The use of reason in its now merely skeptical formulation spreads into faith itself, into the practices of faith and the consciousnesses of the believers. Faith becomes anxious faith. a) Reason has become non-affective in its fundamental structure. The flaw of Kant and rationality: a conception of cognition that lacks any affective momentdisaggregation of cognition and Eros. So the response by Faith is a passionate religious sentimentalism (a reflective relation to the sentiments. E.g. in love with love.) b) Faith is skeptical, and its a kind of move like skepticism into unhappy consciousness. Kierkegaard came 150 years too latehes the continuation of the loser in the battle, and insight is the victor [that becomes unhappy consciousness?] 6. [6-0:00:00] Pure insight, in attacking faith is attacking itself. a) The attack on God is an attack on all content, so the Enlightenment cant realize that the self really is the Substance.
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b) So insight is thrown back on its emptiness (#549). In criticizing faith, it fails to see itself and the necessity of self-relation. The passion of faith doesnt see the logic it enacts. Pure insight doesnt recognize itself in its other (Faith). c) They both seek a pure, immediate relation to essence: Faith positively, insight negatively. They were 17th and 18th century hippies. 7. Faith thinks insight is beside the point since it knows its more than what insight claims. A form of life cant simply be false in the way the Enlightenment critique supposes it to be false. No absolute error. At the spiritual level anything that has the weight of religion cant simply be a mistake. Deleuze and Guattari, e.g., give a wholly external critique of historical error, via the economic. This loses History. a) Thus the Hegelian move of being unable to dismiss philosophies. Philosophy must be a philosophy of the previous philosophies. b) The Hegelian question is: Why is X true? Why cant X sustain itself on its own truths? [Cf. Heidegger in What is Called Thinking? let lie and take to heart.] 8. [6-0:6:41] #552-#553-#554-#555-#556 a) On the one hand, Faith isnt so stupid as to think that the cross isnt a piece of wood. Faith knows that meaning is transcendent of material properties. But because it simultaneously takes its relationship to essence to be absolute, it doesnt have the wherewithalthat is it thinks of it as an absolute to which its in immediate relationshipto explicate this precisely because Faith is self-sufficient. It has no way to resist the Enlightenment. b) Conversely, for the Enlightenment to push through its own criticism of transcendence, it must take the cross-object to be mere wood, and loses the capacity for any form of transcendence. Deleuze and Guattari get stuck with the idea of mere wood because of their notio of decoding. c) The result, having deprived itself of all transcendence, pure insight ends up with sensecertainty. This is the historical moment where sense-certainty arises (#557). This is sensecertainty not as an absolute epistemic starting place, but now understood as as a perfectly conditioned (#557-#558) result of a particular kind of skeptical project, not an origin. So sensecertainty has gone through dissolution to an absolutely conditioned position that can affirm itself as the result of a certain history, giving it a reflexivity that revives it. d) Sense-certainty as the Good is wholly mechanical, Deism, religious materialism. World as watch (#559). 9. [6-0:10:36] #560 a) Hence the important paragraph on the transition to utility. b) To affirm this as result we must give the mechanical a purpose. This in-itself-for-another is what generates utility. Everything is both end and means. Utility is a certain kind of theology, a rich metaphysics. c) You only get the idea of maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain via a naturalism. The question is: What is required for an affirmation of naturalism? d) A defense of utility as the truth of Enlightenment. (1) Bentham and Mill forget how utopia in its original form is a metaphysics of the world, not just an ethico-moral- political position, but this position follows from the metaphysical position. 10. [6-0:14:05] Deism and materialism a) take up the idea of pure insight as pure observation. Leads to the application of utility to beliefs themselves. Rorty, Quine. b) Applying utility to beliefs allows a fully immanent account of knowledge and action that accord with the facts. Utility no longer needs deism. c) So Enlightenment becomes a form of passionate humanism not trapped by the given, since things are judged by their utility. (1) This is the moment of American academic analytical philosophy (#574-#581).
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(2) Rorty claims pragmatism is pragmatically though, not absolutely true. (3) Utility isnt just a fact, but an ideal and principle for ordering actions and beliefs. Its both an explanation of the goodness of beliefs and values and an ought as to how these should be required. 11. [6-0:17:35] Problem: how do we compare, evaluate, criticize desire? Which should be acted on, maximized? How to compare qualitative to quantitative? Its unanswerable because were reflecting upon it. This fact of choosing which desires to act upon implies we musy conceive of ourselves as independent of our desires; we transcend, precede our desires. So the groundlessness of the nihilistic nephew reappears as a freedom of choice. The free relation to our desires causes another problem. 12. There is an intimate connection between the wholly naturalistic story of the early philosophes and the rationalistic project of Rousseau and Kant, and we shouldnt be surprised that one moment followed from the other. 13. [6-0:20:07] The self is shorn of its dependency on its desire, hence shorn of its determinacy. 14. The reflexive version of the self of pure insight. It is a universalistic self. 15. The goodness of a system of satisfaction. a) Whats worth willing must be something affirmable by the will. Willing can only be rational insofar is its self-determining and that self-determinacy must be compatible with all others. Universality of pure insightreflexive self-determination. A rational social order will fuse my willing with what we will. We will is rational insofar as it is what I would will. (Forced to be free.) b) Absolute freedom since no one is being imposed upon. c) Law comes in: obeying something that we can all will for ourselves. Law is neutral and joins individual to the other. d) General will becomes negative (will) essence (universality)a fusing of these two. e) (For Hegel its obvious that utility entails the general will. Were doing the transitions.) f) Hume and Rousseau understand each other. g) The general will cant simply be a criterion of political legitimacy. Rousseau was appropriated: the general will must be a will, making the world expressive of the determining self, actually uniting particular and universal. h) Retrospectively we can see Antigones specificity. (1) The question of individual and universal must be posed as a question of self and society. This requires modernity: an identity apart from social roles and empirical determinations. (2) The logic of Antigone is the activity of individuating Antigone herself. But we must read individuation as anticipating the thought of an individual with a reflective relationship to the society. Antigone loses all determinacy (retrospectively) except for the one of having chosen. But its not an act of choice prospectively. i) Utilitarianism leave no room for the individual. The greatest good, an ethics of social engineering. An indeterminate, impossible gauge of happiness. General will overrides, devalues identity provided by the complex forms of sociality.
B. Absolute freedom
1. [6-0:30:00] Atomizes society, acts against sociality. #585: most radical reduction of difference to same. 2. Universalizesagainst atomic individual. 3. Causal will is a negation of all wills, a normative legitimator. 4. Only insofar as we attempt to realize a system from the top down can we recognize ourselves in the institutions. History is simply dross here. 5. All social classes are abolished. Any individual puts aside (sublates) the spheres of its arising in favor of general will, law and its universal work.
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a) General will is the truth of all these more limited purposes. My purpose or our purpose here, its truth is the purpose of the whole. General will denies alterity, communing only with itself. Negation of negation, since particularity negates the []. 6. #586 a) If my essence as a modern good humanist is to identify my will with the will of all [the pervert], particularity arises as illusion and doesnt have to be reconciled with universal, but identified with it. b) The question of the relation of consciousness to alterity is the question Hegel means to be answering here. The question is now to avoid reducing other to same, and Hegel is the most self-conscious with what Kant raised obliquely. Since Hegel has identified individuality with negativity, theres a fundamental irreducibility of the other [antagonism] to the same. Hegel is raising the question in the form that Derrida would challenge him on. Hegel may fail, but he has set up the problem in the correct form. c) Its not about Universality per se, but about Universality thats indifferent to (unconditioned by) particularity. That says that particularity gets its stuff from universality only. d) This indifference is what makes universality reductive. The critique here is of abstraction, not universality as such. Critique of Platonism. self-determining will is abstracted as having its truth in the pure thought of will, general will. e) But this logical analysis must give way to a metaphysical ground of the abstracted drive. 7. #589-#590: This will must be a rage to whatever would block that self-grounding. Its not an accident: revolution is a response to alienation. 8. #590 a) Universality refuses to maintain itself in broken organicity. Absolute freedom < broken organicity. b) Coldness is the affective equivalent of the moment of indifference. c) Adorno and Hegel just the same here. The critique of coldness. Neutrality has an affect: coldness Terror, Auschwitz. d) Individual can only appear as self-willed. e) Universal will makes the particular abstract particular. Thats the cold gaze: its an individual, but any old individual. (A specimen.) f) Identification of apperceptive self-awareness, self-willing with negativity and death. (1) Its a logical, phenomenological claim about the meaning of apperception. (2) The claim is that the logical core of the passionate humanism of Voltaire, etc., is a stunning indifference. g) Theres no gap between core of Adorno and Hegel. Enlightenment = {Terror, Auschwitz}. (1) What distinguishes Adorno from Hegel is the lack of a French Revolution. [But the Nazis were revolutionaries.] 9. #593 a) The negative moment is the moment of particularity. There is no consciousness without the particular. b) Universals dont exist by themselvesthats the moment of negativity is universality, not its absolute opposite. c) We have to preserve negativity. d) The fury of destruction against [part.] that was in the Terror is equally in Kants categorical imperative which was against particularity and human sensuousness. e) For Hegel, the question of death is one of my relation to the other, not my self-relation. Thats why Lacans account of Antigone shows its Heideggerianess in that shes a playing out of the limit, a being-toward-death. But she only acts this out in relation to Polynices. so its not a being-towards-death, but a being towards the death of the other. f) Think of coldness as absolute mourning.
XIII.
4/26/94
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1. [6-0:56-35] Thesis a) Radical liberal perfectionist (Mill, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, Cavell) left liberal communitarians (Habermas, Rawls) are the two exemplary forms of conscience. b) Spirit is bot self-consciousness and self-certainty. 2. Kant has two notions of will: a) wille (rational will): moral law, rational essence of free will. b) willkr (actual will): principle of apperception. The I think must accompany all my representations, else theyre not mine. Desires are as much a part of nature as trees. 3. Descartes discovers that pure subjectivity is objectivity. Thats the modern project: find the resources within subjectivity an objectivity that is even deeper than the tradition. 4. Kants moral law: ethical individual is driven to fuse willkr. To be moved to action means to take a particular desire as a principle for action. Wille keeps that apperceptive taking on the road. Universality and particularity are unified in the particular will, but not immediately, else were back in the Terror. a) Kants postulates fuse will-willkr into a project, infinite task. (Goldmann: history). Transformation of Enlightenment into philosophy o History. Hegels philosophy of history is not simply a processional joining of rational wills to concrete material world.
B. Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality.

1. [6-1:04:34] #599 a) Hegel claiming that the disenchantment of the natural world isnt a direct product of scientific revolution. That occurs only when ethical consciousness must retreat into itself in order to find its principles of action as principles of a will and a freedom that is in principle dirempt from the natural world. So that the disenchantmet of nature that is on the cards gets completed by German idealism precielsy bey their radicalizaiotn of the modern problem of freedom which occurred as a conseq uence as a kind of failure of the French Rev, the idea that freeom could not be the direct principle for the formation of an independent, external world, since Terror, since nature would become wholly indifferent to human activity.. Hence radicalization of the fact-value distinction. Its when subjectivity becoems associated not only with the meaning of awareness has to be understood as activity qua activity. Theres an ultimate break between the life of the subejctive self and the external world. Conversely, Hume said he was simply the Newton of the mind. Skeptical, but continuous. b) [6-1:08:50] This indifference is the ethical-moral equivalent of the Terror itself: (1) The world has no individual ethical weight. Its an otherness. The will is locked up in itself. The disenchantment of the natural world has become a killing: nature is now dead. Still a rage (Adornos word) against particularity metaphysically expressed via the reification of externality into absolute indifference. Lukacs: you generate the idea of the world as absolute externality, a matter of indifference, through this introversion of freedom. Freedom is worldless so Nature must be dead, its weight is negated. (This is the line from the French Revolution to Kant). (2) This indifference, for Kant, is intolerable, and it expresses itself in this way: that I act in the world. Now the principle of my will, the moral law is just a form. The content of every one of my actions is some concrete particular desire then transformed into a maxim. So content comes from Nature itself. As Hegel puts it (#602), for whaever reason, in acting youre acting on desires, and you hope that your desires are compatible with what morality requires, then moral consciousness cannot forego happiness, and leave this el out of its abolute purpose. So the postulates. 2. First postulate: I act in the world. The principle of my action is just a form; content comes from nature itself. (#602) I cant forego satisfying my desires since thats the content of my will. 3. Kant has to realize the there exist real moral (virtues) and nonmoral (satisfaction of desires) goods. Still part of the complete human good.
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4. Kant: if morality is to be intelligible (not a fantasm), there must be an internal proportionality between virtue and happiness. Moral image of the world: the wholly virtuous shouldnt suffer, the evil shouldnt flourish. Otherwise morality becomes Nietzsches pure ressentiment of the weak. 5. The notion of the postulates of pure practical reason: if there isnt a connection between nature and reality, the postulates give us a goal of moral striving which must be supposed if you are to believe that morality isnt chimerical. a) You must believe that the natural world as an arena for action can become compatible with moral action. That happiness-virtue can be brought into proportion. The willkr can become wille. That my specific, contingent actions can be determined as my duty at the time of their doing, as morally worthy. These are what the postulates achieve. 6. Hegel: the Kantian postulates: a) The harmony of nature-morality as a condition of happiness. b) Immortality of the soul since willkrs task is infinite. c) A God who can grant my contingent choices dutyhood. 7. Kants postulates are actual presuppositions for moral action. Youve implicitly accepted them in order to act at all. 8. (tape semi-transcription) 9. [6-1:24:25] Hegel wants to show that theres a moral duplicity, dissemblance, in accepting this conception of the moral. Because, simply, morality here is constituted by the gap between willkr and wille. In constant separation from its own moral principle. If it were to be realized, then thered be no moralitywed be angels, in immediate relation to morality. a) Kant (and its deep in Western thought): What morality is really about is unruly desires and moral ideals. Very Judeo- Christian. Mind/body dualism, etc. Bringing your unruly desires into harmony with abstract or neutral ideals. Even people who hate Kant accept this. b) Its dissembling since all the energy comes from the separation. Moral striving comes from the gap, from this a priori making your desires bad. c) (Rawls) Although the theory of moral principles is beyond logic, on the basis of the principles you construct an ideal object of striving which comes out of moral thought itself which you then try to approximate yourself to as a temporal adventure. Kantian constructivism; the new thing in moral theory. 10. [6-1:29:14] The second logical point (well do the concrete points after the break): Not only is morality being constituted by this gap, but then we begin to realize the much deeper (metaphysically) issue that human finitude, freedom, is being constituted as a lack. Finitude means not being one of these angels. In a sense, what I really desire is to not have these desires at all. Kants holy will. But finitude only appears as the gap between actual will and the ideal. a) This is Hegels metaphysical critique of Kantianism. Kant hasnt, despite the Copernican turn, really accepted human finitude. But that was the whole purpose of the Copernican turn: to stop asking how things appeared from Gods perspective, and ask if things were compatible with how we must perceive them, where must is wille and the categories. b) But the finitude thats supposed to be at the heart of Kant: the human freedomthe capacity for negativity, choice and historyall is for the sake of the displacement of desire, choice, negativity, and history. We only exist historically in order to exist non-historically. Hegel is contending that any theory having this structure (e.g. Marxist philosophy of history) is a fundamental rejection of human finitude. It thinks of negativity as lack rather than as constitutive principle. 11. [6-1:31:10] #621, #622 a) Given this schema which generates this radical duality between the highest good and everyday moral action, especially given that the highest good is the object of moral striving, then we have problems making sense of the relationship. About the relationship between individual actions and reality, because individual deeds do sometimes realize their ends. Achieve harmony of freedom and nature.
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b) If my goal is moral perfection, then I end up instrumentalizing my moral deeds. Im good not for the sake of the object, but for the sake of my soul, will. But I cant really be seeking the highest good because if I really thought only the highest good was good, then it would be morality itself which is the gap between the highest good and actuality. So theres something about actuality that matters. c) Its a phenomenological, not a logical, critique because what its trying to do is show how such a moral consciousness comes upon, experiences, the inadequacies of its position, and the form of these inadequacies here is dissemblance and duplicity. My moral self behaves immorally in the very attempt to be moral. Thats what makes it a phenomenological demonstration. (1) The argument before about the metaphysicswhat you might call a philosophical critique of Kantianismthis is the phenomenological experience of that morality coming to be undermined. It acts... d) Kant seems to want to figure individual desires as not the point for what makes individual actions moral. What makes them moral is both the form of the moral law, that is, my motive in doing it: to bring the moral law about, and that means realizing the highest good. (1) But theres something absolutely crazy about this because when, say, I aid someone in distress, is morality to be located in my doing that act and realizing that purpose, or in the fact that Im acting on the motive one ought to help others in distress? (2) Hegels thought, his point about action, is that I can only do moral actions if they have moral purposes. My real purpose must be to aid the other. But in helping others Im satisfying my desire. (3) Kant must displace both the morality of the action qua content and the satisfaction. But actual moral action works against this. Hence the serious/non-serious problem arises. e) Hegel asks the old question: What is meant by the idea of perfection here if its an infinite task? You cant be serious about that perfection if the condition of acting on it is that it never be realized. 12. [6-1:37:04] #625 a) By trying to remove contingency from moral experience, which is what the postulates try to do, the postulates try to logically insulate the meaning of morality from contingency (sometimes things go badly, sometimes worse). In so doing, they make themselves envious of those who are flourishing. The whole strategy of Kants ethics is to insulate the moral from the contingent while nonetheless wanting all the benefits of contingency, namely happiness. The large mistake here is: placing an absolute law above the will, above willkr . So that man exists for the law rather than vice versa. A nice way of seeing the problem of Kantianism. 13. conscience a) If that is the difficulty of Kantianism, then the next form of moral consciousness must be one in which the claim to universality isnt independent from particular concrete willkr. And that is precisely whats figured by the notion of conscience. The thought of conscience is the thought that something is my duty where the notion of dutysomething is morally obligatory has all the sense that it has for a Kantian (it has a claim to universal recognition, it acts on the basis that others are conscientious moral agents.) What are the bases for the principles of action for the beings who inhabit such a world. (1) The problem with the Kantians is that they wanted an ultimate criterion for morality. Namely a formal criterion (universality) on the one hand, and an ultimate object of moral striving on the other (utopian fulfillment of that modern discovery of universality). (2) If its the case that its the erecting of the law above the self thats the cause of the Kantian difficulties, then its plausible that what makes something my duty, equality, universality, objectivity etc. arent an issue. Conscience is the mode that says that what makes a particular action one that is dutiful and obligatory is that I take it to be so, that is, I adopt it freely on the basis of my willkr.
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(3) Why this is important: As modern moral consciousnesses we cant disavow our capacity for autonomy (self-determination). What weve discovered from our reading of Kant is that theres no principle of self- determination, no ultimate criterion for what makes an action self-determining. Conscience arises as the claim of the individual to be in the mode of its choosing the ultimate determinant of what is to be morally required. 14. #635 a) The claims of conscience: b) Since there cant be a duty unless its selected by me as my duty, then there cant be a conflict of duties. What may appear as a duty has no independent weight. Only its incorporation into my will makes it an obligation. Duties are synthetic products of practical reasoning. c) Even if there were a moral law above willkr, what the problem of modern subjectivity this notion requires is that [if the] limiting cannot be wholly independent of me coming to recognize it as valid. But if can only become valid through my recognition of its validity, it cant be independent. Cant bypass the apperceptive moment. You cant avoid putting propositional truth in relation to your subjectivity. d) [If negativity is a condition of self-determination, then Laclau and Mouffe are right about antagonism.] 15. (#637) If nothing exists outside of willkr, then I can be certain that whatever I take to be my duty is my duty. Further, that in acting there are no longer discrete acting and motive. No formcontent distinction. (#638) If theres no form-content distinction at the level of action, then there can be no distinction between my moral essence and my concrete individuality. My concrete willkr is also and simultaneously my pure or essential moral self. (#639) Its now the case that the law exists for the self. What I take to be my duty has both subjective and objective significance. My duty has a sense of not only being for me, but also intrinsic being or being-for-another. A match of essence and existence, thought and being. 16. #640 a) Therefore the notion of conscience presupposes a sharing and an objectivity, a mesh between objective and intersubjective. b) In his construction of conscience hes synthesizing the recognitional structure of universality found in the Roman conception of the legal person with the absolute freedom of the revolutionary subject. c) The Roman legal person was to have a conception of a moral world without a self. Conversely, the French Revolution has a will without a world. d) What were driving towards is to provide a way of having a self ethically in the world. e) If Im puzzling about what to do and Im a conscientious individual, trying to listen to the voice of conscience, youre really asking yourself, given basic modern humanistic claims, what you ought to do. The thought of conscience is that that act of liberation in coming to a decision and then feeling the rightness of that that I must not go visit Heidegger. The point is that on the basis of my internal reflection and the presumption of the purity of that act of selection, Im both myself determining what is right, but believe that the determination isnt arbitrary. By means of that reflection, Im making a judgment about whats right that has a claim to objectivity by everyone because of the kind of stance I took to the process of selection. I acted conscientiously. f) The notion of conscience presupposes that Im asking about the possibility about making the subjective claim to universality that can be intersubjectively recognized. Its an attempt to make an objective judgment without criterion. The notion of objectivity is to speak with the universal voice in some way. Making a claim to intersubjective recognition. g) Perhaps conscience is the moralization of aesthetic judgment. h) Conscience is theoretically flawed because two consciousnesses may clash. But its phenomenologically true. The thought of conscience has never been a serious position, but
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phenomenologically we need to really think through its claims. Hegel thinks that he must get to where he wants to go since conscience has already radicalized this claim of modern subjectivity and its relationship to objectivity. Were taking a crazy moral position seriously. i) For Hegel, the source of skepticism is realism. Realism for our purposes, is simply the belief that theres some ultimate independent matter of fact thats not an accomplishment of subjectivity, but stands opposed to it and measures it. And now the moral law, which looked to be the principle of Reasons, and was therefore though to be within subjectivity itself, theo whole Kantian schema is shown to be realistic. Thats what Hegels been showing: that Kant really isnt an idealist at all. The deep skepticism that comes out as sembalance, duplicity, and absolute skepticism, all that is Kants realism. The notion of conscience is that attempt to bring a developed self-conscious self-awareness about subjectivity and its claims, to make that the source of the moral itself. So you remove any radical externality that could rise up above subjectivity without wanting to collapse into relativism or individualism. j) The phenomenology of conscientious deliberation itself tokens our belief that we believe in objectivity, and believe that the process of deliberation matters. k) What Hegel means by realism is what nowadays is called metaphysics. 17. [6-1:57:57] The antinomies of conscience a) Its going to be a flip-flopping between particularity and universality. b) Each claim by conscience gets challenged by another conscientious agent. The text becomes dialogic. No longer are we watching an individual natural consciousness undoing itself and thus commenting on it. What weve now got is grown-ups arguing amongst themselves and transforming themselves in so doing. c) Triple whammy; every action has a double register: intentional and expressive. [7-0:00:00] Opens up the interplay between action, self, and community. d) Each antinomy turns on a problem concerning moral action. Each arises because of the way in which we must regard human actions generally. We get an implicit theory of moral action in the antinomies. Its easier to read through Hegels analytic of action than any other way.
XIV.
4/28/94
1. [7-0:01:25] Conscience is a presumptive overcoming of the split between universalistic morality and the concrete particular self. Because for the conscientious self what it takes to be its duty, where the taking is precisely the Kantian notion of apperception, has in virtue of that taking a claim to universality, i.e., a claim to recognition by all. Husserl: an act that is there for everyone. a) We have this incredible uniting of {negativity, for-itself, apperception} with {universality, foranother, in-itself}. Unites existence, or being, with thought. As a consequence, each individual is self determining, and in being self-determining, each is legislative. Each individual acts as a universal legislator (Kantian in that way). Apperception is a giving of the law and cannot withdraw from the legislative dimension or claims to universality. 2. In locating conscience in the history of Spirit, we (not it) note that its formed historically. Wille is just historically formed willkr. a) This conscience is formed out of Terror, blood, and violence just as Nietzsche says, Genealogy of Morals 498: how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all good things! (1) The claim to sovereignty can only be vindicated if the claim to conscience can be vindicated. So Nietzsche is no different from Hegel. Nietzsche's critique of truth is the same as Hegels critique of wille. Thats the point of the Genealogy of Morals. (The sovereign self is always communal; you cant teach people to be autonomous: Zarathustra.) (2) Theres no absolute truth beyond ourselveswere unknown to ourselves, we knowers. Self-legislation would be a historical development. b) Conscience is formally incoherent. Cant reconcile two conflicting consciences. But we cant give up moral autonomy, else back to Antigone.
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3.
4.
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7.
8.
(1) The claim to certainty, epistemic privilege is the problem, Antigone had simple certainty; now we have complex certainty. Triple whammy a) Fallibility: you must have absolute moral knowledge (history of action, present disposition of situation, consequences) in order to act correctly. conscience tries to bury this, tries to disown fallibilism, but this is impossible b) Interpretive pluralism. Whats the meaning of an action? Intention, ultimate purpose. Like meaning of text = authorial intentions. Intentions cant determine meaning because the work is put into a context over which the author has no control. c) Reproachability (the most important one): in claiming that Im acting conscientiously according to duty, Im simultaneously claiming the immediate moral worth of the action. I want to say that no matter what happens Ive done the right thing. Clean conscience. This desire is the overriding drive of modern moral philosophy. (1) Rawls, Benhabib. Something can be morally worthy no matter what happens. They search for a form that will vindicate the individual or the community irrespective of consequences. Theyll be beyond reproach. But it follows from fallibility and interpretive pluralism that no one can be beyond reproach. Its no good saying I didnt mean to run over that family. I was just having a drunken good time. This isnt to say that they could have acted otherwise. The action wasnt a mistake. e.g. supplying food to Bosnians just so they can be killed when they gather to pick it up cant be moral. (2) Its a formalism that makes conscience itself another moral form. I act on my conscience irrespective of content. #648 a) intentions: expressive:: act: self b) Modernity is stoic. Modern moral philosophy drives toward stoicism. Is Nietzsche malgr lui a stoic? c) We have to understand conscience as a form, not a content. Conscience has to take on board these criticisms. It acknowledges the triple whammy. #651 [ I flaked] a) Need relation of constative and performative. b) the We hold of the constitution is the apperceptive moment. The constitution is both constituting and disclosing. c) performative: constative:: political: legal permanent aporia #653 [T7A.344] a) We can separate the evaluation of the action from the evaluation of the self. That possibility is essential to modernity, where we allow for some self-determination thats not bound to the action done. b) But these shouldnt become two different worlds. At a certain point the action feeds back on the self. The evaluation of the action overrides the moment of the self. c) the question is what does it mean to act in a fallibilistic context? Absolutism is the problem itself. #654 [T7A.383 I flaked] a) Moved from a relation to action to a relation of self and community. b) All conscientious action is ironic. But well get to that. Continuum hypothesis of action. a) find a method for revealing that human action as such has a transgressive nature. b) Tragic ignorance is now no longer tragic. Its constitutive of all human action. Gets us on the way to claiming the... c) continuum hypothesis: (1) [7-336:00] habitual-routine-rule: the self disappears. Ismene. No innocence. First chapter on Spirit.
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(2) Innocent trespass. (3) routine transformations (Derridas iteration): using a simple set of rules to generate an infinite number of sentences. (4) individuation through creative appropriation (5) [7-0:39:20] creative transfiguration (the above #4 with balloons). E.g. queer thoery is creative transforming the way we think of sex and gender. Interactive, not self-reflective model. (6) [7-0:39:58] criminality. d) The last five are things that harm the other, looked at from the inside. Agents standpoint, not theoreticians standpoint. The ordering is different whether you do it logically or phenomenologically. e) Negativity, contingency is constitutive of the possibility of action and language. f) Its not an accident that were calling it transgression.2-6 are categorially evil. Evil is constitutive of any possibility of there being Good. Good = Evil. g) Human action takes place in a space of non-recognition as a condition of recognition. 9. [7-0:45:46] Im contrasting now, or going to contrast, a fundamentally stoic attempt, the stoic attempt is to recuperate modern individuality without transgressivity. Im saying, and what Im objecting to, then, or what Hegels objecting to in everything he reads, is that the Christians were, in a sense, right. That particularity is a source of transgression beyond universality, but thats the condition of possibility of both individuality and History. Because History is novelty. Novelty is always destruction/ creation. So we can only be historical beings, and we are historical beings, insofar as we accept this fundamental picture of human action as transgressive.
What is the space of transgression which is non-recognition? Its just a space where theres... The space of transgression is the potential for non-recognition because you are stepping outside what we know already. So I walk into class, just walk into the class and I go [unrecognizable hand gesture]. I was just trying to say How is everybody? No response. Try to transgress all the rules, create a new one, do something with the smilekind of a dadaesque reading. It didnt work, OK? Now I could feel very humiliated because it so happens I spent hours last night trying to think of it. In other words, the fact of meaning and self are tied together through action and its recognitional pick-up. Lets put it this way: Derrida is stupid because he doesnt understandnow thats a silly thing to say. OK. Derrida disconnects iteration from recognition. He makes it a logical feature and disconnects it from its phenomenological structure. Im saying that iteration is actually a part of the relationship between selves. Which condemns them to evil. Absolutely. Hence theres something bizarre...and thats why I was suggesting to people earlier one should read the place where he almost gets this point and then forgets it is in Violence and Metaphysics, wheres hes actually accusing Levinas of not understanding that there cant be non-recognition, i.e., the absolute other, without there being recognition. So hes saying you cant have excess, i.e. transgression, without recognition. And its the most, its where hes operating as an Hegelian against Levinass anti-Hegelianism. [gap] The attempt to transform it into a logical structure makes neither of the moments of transgression or reiteration intelligible. Or, rather, their intelligibility is illusory. That theres got to be, I want to claim, a source of negativity. We are that source. Otherwise the process of reiteration could not get going. Therefore, I will be arguingsee, its still introductory commentsreally, really; I havent argued it yet; warming up; a long introduction today therefore, one wants to argue, that the most significant notion of absolute otherness is the negativity of the other. MELANI GUINN: Could you say that again? The absolutely other is the others negativity.
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Yeah, but doesnt Hegel do that in the Logic through a grammatical... Of course. and why didnt Derridas logical move...
Oh. No, no, Hegel doesnt do it through a logical move, because he ends up with the, the structure of the Logic is, the conditions for the possibility for determination, which is the first question. He goes through the logic of essence, and then finally the argument is: no determining without self-determining subjectivity, or as he calls it, free self-determining personality. The ground, for Hegel, is always freedom, which is an ungrounded ground, doubly for Hegel. Because theres no freedom without recognition of self and otherness. So I only have my freedom through an other, who is absolutely other, because theyre also a negativity. And because its freedom its abyssal on both sides. So its a double abyss. conversation 5/8/94 And Hegel calls that Absolute Spirit. Absolute Spirit is simply the structure of a double abyss. Zizek almost says that. OK, lets see if we can get there.
To the double abyss? Yeah! Thats where I want to go! Thats where Im going; you can come if you want. Ill probably serve cocktails when we get there, though. Ive been going all my life. Hegels going to set up the possibility of all this by considering two possibilities of what he calls the beautiful soul. Weve already looked at the Santa Cruz hippie community. Now, if were going to understand that in a thoughtful way, then we have to see that the problem weve been dealing with is this refusal of externalization. And its precisely the notion of the refusal of externalization that Hegel calls the beautiful soul. And really, we should understand that the notion of the beautiful soul is really the metaphor for all modern stoical subjects. Theyre all nothing but beautiful souls.
10. [7-0:50:19] #659, #660 sets us up for the two forms of the beautiful soul: acting and judging consciences.
a) acting: ironic self, civil disobedient perfectionist. b) The essence of the notion of conscience is the moment of apperception, of negativity. But if its only qua negativity that I get to myself, then its a reduction of my individuality to a moment of universality thats indifference. c) So want: always be in a negative relation to my own legislative declarations, actions. d) [T7B.271] Ironic: its always a remove from what it concretely enacts. Always a gap between its negativity and the empirical realization of that negativity. e) Perpetual self-overcoming is the contagion of the reduction of self to other. All these are built on these contagious fears. (1) This is the structure of Mill in On Liberty the common vs. idiosyncratic. (2) Heidegger in Das Mann. (3) Rorty: waking up and finding one is a replica. (4) Nietzsche: Zarathustra who must overcome himself anew. (5) Habermas: need. f) Movements to authenticity, self-overcoming are reified moments of negativity that are locked into a structure where negativity is separated from otherness. g) [T7B.309] Anxieties for authenticity are desires for purity. 11. #660 Instead of opting for negativity, it opts for universality. a) [T7B.317] Were all conscientious selves, realizing that notion of conscience requires community of conscientious selves and that this communitys grounding cant be stronger then what it takes to... b) What we take as constituting the community-binding rules will be the laws of our community of conscientious selves. c) How to conscientiously get these laws? (1) Rawls: ask pure conscientious selves, genderless, classless selves. Tries to eliminate the negative moment. (2) Habermass principle deed is the same: Whats good for the community is what everyone could agree to if they were treated transparently, communicative selves. 12. Historical transformations of the figures we began with, but now understood historically:
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a) Judging conscience = left liberal communitarian. (1) Sophisticated Creon. Body of universal law. b) Acting conscience = radical Nietzschean ironists. (1) Modernized form of Antigone coming to understand her own individuality, unwilling to be coopted. (2) Finding her truth in holding out for individuality itself against coercive universalism. 13. #660: Judging conscience judges acting conscience thusly: a) Holding out against any connectedness holds out against all of us, so thats evil. But since it claims conformity to duty, youre a hypocrite 14. #661, #662: Acting conscience responds: a) Yes, Im holding out against community, but I can see that Im attacking your universal. So youre right, Im evil. But not being a hypocrite, I want to confess my evil, take responsibility. b) You cant be conscientious and expect at the same time that you wont harm anything. c) [T2A.000] Yes, Im evil, but my intention is precisely that my particular law should be the law of all, so therefore I expose myself to the community as making a universal claim, but from outside. Ive become the civil disobedient. Not sanctimonious since the claim to clean hands is given up. Apperception entails that entanglement.
XV.
5/3/94
1. The original problem: knowledge. skepticism, ultimately, which arises from a commitment to realism (belief in ultimate fact-of- the-matter). 2. Hegels premise: realism entails skepticism. But what kind of idealism is true, if any? 3. Assumes Copernican turn: any knowing assumes that forms of knowing accord with conceptions of the world. 4. [T3A.050] The overcoming of epistemology. The shift to self-consciousness from a representational form of being in the world. Taking on a practical relationship to the world, mediated by an active self-relation (apperceptive moment). And the apperceptive moment is related to an externality (master-slave, the god of the unhappy consciousness). 5. Hegel means to reveal a hidden realism, a hidden desire for adequation to a hidden standard, independent from ones reflective self-relationship. This is Hegels critique of Kant: the moral law as universal (wille) standard to which willkr must adequate. The impossibility becomes the infinite task. 6. Thats the apperception. [T3B.109] 7. Either the self-relation discounts the alterity (French Revolution; reduction of other to same) or the alterity is unattainable, but structuring (forever apart from me). Hegel wants self-recognition in absolute otherness, others that arent reducible to our selves. 8. Move to Spirit 9. Theoretical not phenomenological. 10. We must inhabit a concrete world in which those forms (like categories) have evolved. Theyre there historically. 11. First notion of personhood: rights, non-naturalRomans. But was arbitrary and needed Caesar to hold it together. 12. Goal: a phenomenological account of how Spirit = {we <whos an > I, History, knowledge of History}. 13. [T3A.160] Conscience poses highest difficulty for idealist: we ought to act in a self-determining way. But then we get the antinomies o conscience: if Im self-determining and you are too, then weve got skepticism, relativism. Most significant form of skepticism. The real question of externality is other conscientious selves, and that threatens the deepest problem. 14. Conscience in its certainty is again realism. Being conscientious becomes a standard beyond the others: its a realism. 15. All formalism is a form of realism: the big critique of Kant. You cant use a form-content distinction to get through.
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16. [T3A.184] Human action is incommensurable with conscience in its strong form. a) moral fallibilism, ineliminable interpretive pluralism => b) no action can be vindicated a priori => c) no possibility of a priori moral innocence. 17. Greek tragic ignorance (source of heros downfall) is a universal feature of all human action, which then has the dimension of tragic ignorance. Furthermore, like Antigone, all action is transgressive, which we see in acting and judging conscience (which are two forms of the beautiful soul). 18. Moral stoicism: keep conscience clean, beautiful soul. 19. Acting vs. judging conscience a) Acting conscience does it by becoming an ironist. Apperceptive moment = self-selection = creative act. Acting conscience distanced itself from the action itselfZarathustra, etc., whose purity is his negativity and opposition to the norms he has opposed. Not crazy because it captures the apperceptive moment. b) [T3A.190] Judging conscience is opposite. There must be norms, practices that are the recognition of each other as conscientious selves. Judging conscience generates a body of norms (Habermas, Rawls) which are taken as the fullest expression of conscience. This becomes the standard. Its purity resides in its never being an agent, never allowing politics in, but only allowing norms to emerge. 20. Its a battle between the ironist and the judge, modern Antigone and modern Creon. 21. How does judging conscience judge the ironist? a) #660: Acting conscience is in explicit transgression of the judging community. And you say youre acting conscientiously and youre outside us? Youre evil since youre outside us. Furthermore, youre a hypocrite. b) #662: Acting conscience recognizes her transgression, and that she must be regarded as evil. In confessing evil, hypocrisy falls away. She must identify herself with her act. Concrete negative, not abstract negativity. Acting conscience is thereby drawn into a fuller identity of who she is with her act of negation. This is how the ironist becomes an Antigone figure. The ironist isnt wrong to hold onto the apperceptive moment, but to reify it. 22. [7-1:27:46] #665: All that judging consciousness sees is sheer particularity with no universality. The conscientious self [hears?] all this: If Im not going to achieve my desires, from where will I act? a) p.404: No action... All action has the moment of particularity, and thats not some sort of flaw in the action, but its the condition of possibility for action. Action and universality come from particulars. 23. [7-1:29:27] #666 a) Judging consciousness puts the universal over the particular and takes itself to thus be superiorrealism again. Reified universality. b) Modern political theory tries to eliminate action by replacing it with theory, forms that make action redundant. And this isnt an accidental problem, but is part of modern stoicism. c) Judging consciousness, in affirming something, is doing the same thing as acting consciousness: theyre both individuals making claims to universality. Acting consciousness confesses this ineliminability of transgressive action. d) => acting consciousness = judging consciousness. e) Acting consciousness then expects mutual recognition. The confession isnt an abasement (#666.-9) but a claim to equality. f) Its important that this is a secular not a religious confession. The is to establish the commonality of the two performatively enacted by the avowal-confession. The avowal has a cognitive content. Ineliminable individuality as a condition of possibility for either of them acting conscientiously.
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g) Its solidarity thats being elicited here in replacement of universal norma and standards. But why confess? Whats that tell us about the meaning of solidarity? h) Conscience has discovered its non-universal voice. i) The negativity of my deeds is an indicator of my not being in agreement with myself. Universality and particularity are coordinated, but never identical: Im necessarily outside my control, thrown upon the other. j) [7-1:38:00] Avowal is exemplary. In speaking for myself, I must presume to speak for you, else Im not speaking at all. (All language is legislative, all action transgressive.) We can establish the common when I confess this and you can come to recognize yourself in me and thereby recognize me. k) All action anticipates the answering voice. That answering voice is my dependency on the other. 24. [7-1:39:35] #667 a) But judging consciousness doesnt confess back. The hard heart refusing continuity. b) Rousseauian conceit: to confess all: Im evil, but so are you. The problem here is that expecting the other to confess rehearses a moral logic: its to say that forgivenenss should follow confession. Because were all in this together in the same boat that were all morally inocent. And that isnt the same as admitting real evil. So the rebuff isnt untoward because there is something wrong with the confession, there are limits to confession. As if to say ones individuality desires, etc., could be discounted by everyones having them. Thats why there is the hard heart rejects this ocmmunity of Nature, because this equality is an equality of us as natural beings. Ant theres a kind of reduction going on in the Confessions. The expectation that the judge will return her confession with his own, and c) Acting consciousness treats the avowal as a kind of moral payment or investment through which she should receive payment in kind. Her expectation of payment in kind takes away the moral attributes and gives it a prudential character. Because of this expectation the confession wasnt an abasement, but an investment. Its a good investment. This underlies systems of desert and merit. Confession merits forgiveness, forgiveness deserves to be returned. Hegel is dropping all of that. d) [Montel Williams: the guy who confessed back his infidelity, and the expert condemned the mutual forgiving as being anything but.] e) [7-1:44:11] What Hegel is doing here is disabusing us of our deepest philosophical and moral desires: namely, to think that theres a good reason to recognize another person as a person. That after all is how philosopy and moral thought seems to work. Thats got to be a mistake because the whole point of the argument is to say only in virtue of recognition do you have reasons at all. Apart from the ethical insight, there is not metaphysical insight, and vice versa, that we cant get to the standpoint because were already there. One point is that only in virtue of recognition can there be these reasons at all. f) Recognition is the condition of possibility of good reasons. We cant get to the standpoint because were already there. Theres no logical way there. g) Phenomenology is explicating the excessive, or, non-detachability of insight from the ethical form of he or she who has it. In confession, {solidarity, Spirit} precedes what will transpire from it. But theres also the recognition that Spirit is both presupposed and performatively generated. It doesnt exist apart from that performance. But tha performance is still the performance of an individual selfa Oneand doesnt entail an answering voice. 25. [7-1:47:16] She sees the hard heart as wicked, giving her no place to stand, threatening loss of self. The relation becomes frozen. The hard heart pretends to empty the place of universality. Moral transcendence transcribed as mute willful silence (like a God). Uncommunicative universality is only self-asserting particularity, and hence in some sense, evil. He makes her into an unhappy consciousness.
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a) Via the hard hearts refusal, confession becomes a throwing away, not an investment. Confession is thereby excessive. The hard hearts non-response is essential: she only gains self-possession by throwing herself away on the other. Confession is a risk, else its not confession. Reveals her absolute dependence on him and the depths of her separateness. Destroys prudential reasons for morality. b) The logical structure of recognition is an impossible middle: always presupposed, always yet-to-be-attained. c) Recognition cant have any determinate formulation. But without the performance of the confession we miss this. 26. But Hegel is going to give us forgiveness as the most excessive act possible. 27. [7-1:51:56] Hegel is going to use the notion of the hard heart to draw out these claims, establish them. And Im saying that these are disappointing because where we might have hoped for Hegel finally to show us why we ought to recognize ourselves in otherness, hes going to have an activity, namely that of forgiveness, which is the most excessive act (Im going to claim) of which were capable. Because its an action about the meaning of action. And that it has to be, in a certain sense, groundless. So Im pointing to the fact that mutuality and recognition is always a groundless ground. Its groundless ground because its something accomplished through freedom, through action. And though always already accomplished through freedom and action, it has yet to be bound together. [I.e. its always already presupposed and yet to be achieved.] 28. The hard heart exemplifies all refusals, blindnesses. In the hard heart is expressed the secret rage of the omnipotence of thought. 29. [7-1:56:25] His relationship to the acting consciousness is an emblem in which he stands for all versions of otherness in relation to a self now. Then, of course, the reversal of fortune, the parapetia, that he undergoes is itself immediate and literal in Hegels treatment. a) #668 Lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence [its still a beautiful soul], and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis...this beautiful soul is disordered to the point of madness.
This is the causality of fate. But in a much more complicated way than in Greek tragedy. Because in Greek tragedy, if you remember, I said that the relationship was always causal, that you did an innocent, but in ignorance, it had certain consequences, and they flipped back on you and destroyed you. But here, what the Greeks lacked, the reason they told a causal story was because they lacked a sense of who the self was. So Hegel is here saying that in cases of modernity, where the issue in any action is who we are, and our dependence on others for those possibilities, becomes, under these conditions, madness. The collapse of subjectivity and interiority onto itself is perhaps the only adequate metaphor we have for this form of selfdestruction. Because here, in refusing the other, the hard heart refuses itself. And because it is the most extreme form of rebellion because of its absoluteness, it can only simply collapse in on itself. Whats important here is to see that, on Hegels account, this madness is misunderstood if we think of it as intrapsychial rather than interpsychial. The madness is conditioned by the refusal of alterity, so its because of the kind of relationship to exteriority that the hard heart is broken. So the madness of the heart is both the symptom and symbol of the withdrawal from actuality, of what I called throwing oneself away on the other. It is this madness that is the breaking of the hard heart, where this breaking is the ur-form of the collapse of every form of consciousness. Since every form of consciousness is refusal, in some way, to find oneself in the other, then the breaking of the hard heart is emblematic of this. But its no accident, it seems to me, that Hegel uses the language of hard-heartedness, because hard-hearted folk, when broken, or in breaking, or in being broken have a change of heart. Whats going on at this moment is precisely a change of heart that is a conversion, a turning around, a shift of standpoint. That is, the movement of the hard heart, which is going to be the condition of possibility of forgiveness
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or is going to be equivalent to the notion of forgivenessis an act of conversion and cant be anything else. Again, my whole argument that there are no sufficient reasons that the conditions of possibility of an understanding are internal to the standpoint reached. Therefore we reach it by a series of conversions, or as Kuhn would put it, paradigm shiftsits the same thought, except that this one is now wholly ethical in its contours. Notice the big shift here, which is the movement (#667 again), from opposition to perception of continuity with the other as a universal. This shift is just both an ethical shift and an ontological shift. That is, its a movement from unconditioned subjectivity to intersubjectivity, form ontological atomism and moral individualism to ontological wholism, that is objective idealism, and some form of ethical collectivism.This is Hegels version of tragic recognition. Why I call it tragic recognition Ill come to in a minute. LIZ GOODSTEIN: Do you think you could run that by again? Which bit? LIZ GOODSTEIN: The isms. Oh, the conversion. The conversion is from unconditioned subjectivity to intersubjectivity. From ontological atomism and moral individualism to ontological wholism, or what Im simply going to call objective idealism, and some form of ethical collectivism. But the crux here is its a change of perspective that occurs. That the breaking of the hard heart and the act of forgiveness thats going to be rendered must be understood as a conversion process. And of course, what Im indicating, or mean to indicate by that, is that the notion of experience that we were given as methodological in the introductionthis book was to be The Science of the Experience of Consciousness, and experience was to be this shift of standpoints, from one sort of consciousness to another. Im now claiming that this movement, this notion of experience, just is the structure of subjectivity. That its not a mere methodology. That it is, for Hegel in a certain sense, the whole story of the relationship between self and other. JENI MILLER: In other words, that that story is the story of our changing notions of experience? No, what I mean is that what happens macroscopically throughout the Phenomenology, and happens historically throughout the chapter on Spirit, actually enters into the very constitution of subjectivity itself in the last moment. That is, that the idea of acting and having a truth, and then this collapsing, and having to reform oneself in a new form is actually just the movement of subjectivity. MARK ROBERTS: So its posited as the actual concrete history of the development of this type of subjectivity or its what leads up to the moment... Its both. Why? yeah, ok. You might say, Well why is there experience? [7-2:02:00 (end)]
30. [T7B.236] Phenomenology has to enable absolute knowing in order to ditch skepticism. 31. Were talking about structures of understanding that are presupposed by absolute knowing. The literature assumes that Absolute Knowing is the removal of negativity. Bernstein considers it the universalization of negativity. 32. [T7B.274] Hegel tried to relocate causality of fate in the constitution among subjectivities. 33. Negativity and recognition are the two moments that subjectivity is, that Spirit is. We have to come to a fuller understanding of negativity. 34. Problem: negativity is unsurpassable, so what might be thought to be a neutral recognition never occurs. There exists and there does not exist mutual recognition. 35. #669: The wounds of the Spirit heal is spooky stuff. Is it metaphysical? No, since forgiveness is a precondition. 36. #670: Forgiveness is the overcoming of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. [T7B.330]. 37. ([T7B.340] verbatim transcription)
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a) The difficulty here is to understand the transgressive quality of human activity, the negativity of human consciousness, the unavoidability of that, when we acknowledge that its necessary for the possibility of action because our simple problem is that were always transgressing on the other. b) The key to understanding Hegels idea of punishment: in a certain sense we must treat action as reversible, not belonging to natural causality. c) Arendt, The Human Condition 216: In this respect forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of reacting against an original trespassing whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed everybody remains bond to the process, permitting the chain of reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. d) The model of revenge is the model of yeah theres evil, theres negativity of action and there's no way of overcoming that. All we can do is transgress again. But action is transgression, so it looks as if transgression and revenge is the natural morality of human beings. And thats just what Hegel thinks: its Natural Morality: the paradigm of everything that doesnt have the shape of Spirit reduces to revenge. e) Arendt: In contrast, revenge, which is the natural automatic reaction to transgression and which the cause of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated the act of forgiving can never be predicted. It is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way, and thus retains the something of the original character of action [JB: something of negativity itself; negation of negation. Forgiving in other words does not only react, but acts anew and unexpectedly [JB: in excess, for no reason, without grounds] unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. f) The philosophical question: Do we have the power of forgiveness? If not, Hegels wrong about Spirit and idealism and we end up in skepticism. Because unless we can make room for the fact that in a certain fundamental way you must be negative with respect to me in order to be yourself. Unless we can make room for that fact as compatible with your being for yourself and my being for myselfwere dependent on one anotherthen we just end up in the war of all against all, permanently. g) Hegel is more radical than most individualistsalthough hes not onebecause he has ontological negativity driving the whole thing and a deep notion of sociality which is compatible with an objectivists conception of justice. So unless something like forgiveness works, were in trouble. h) Can we forgive anything? Is forgiveness a nice social fiction (what a naturalist would say)? (We cant undo action so we suppress it.) Is there evidence of this power outside our exercise of it? If not, what would count as a vindication of our possession of it? i) Both Hegel and Arendt deny that our power for forgiveness is absolute. Both conceive of punishments as accomplishing the same end as forgiveness, i.e., putting an end to a course of action, and thereby mending the fabric of society, mediately through punishment, reintegrating the criminal into it. If the end of punishment is reintegration, then the criminal who returns is no longer a criminal. j) Arendt: We cant punish what we cant forgive. But what is unpunishable, unforgivable, radical evil? This is exactly how she vindicates the death penalty for Eichmann. Not as due punishment, but as the impossibility of punishment. The acts of such criminals are not one we can frame. Why not? Because they attack the condition of possibility of action itself. k) How can I forgive an act that destroys the basis, the condition on which life depends? But if we think this is right, that this isnt a psychological quirk, no matter how we draw the boundaries all Im claiming is that if we can think about what is unforgivable, or beyond punishment (and this is why Im using the argument here) then it looks as if we cant forgive. That is, it looks as if (the naturalist: this is just a way of forgetting). Im saying Look, take old
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Adolf: I have all the evidence in the world that hes not going to commit this crime again. That if I put him in the gas chamber, Im not going to deter genocidal maniacs or non-maniacs. Why do it? Im claiming that the thought here is because we have lost the possibility of measurement. l) How to draw that linemurder, rape, genocideis irrelevant, Im claiming, is necessarily indeterminate. But it makes sense to pose that distinction. The notion of forgiveness and punishment isnt merely psychological. And furthermore, it doesnt seem to me important whether we think the right way of dealing with the unforgivable and the unpunishable is the death penalty, or ostracism, or personal isolation; I think the choice of all those things (Hegel went for the death penalty) I think the choice of how we deal with the unpunishable says more about us than about what were punishing.
XVI. 5/5/94 A. Religion

1. [8-0:08:51] Negativity, transgression are constitutive of action, human particularity, individuality. So each individual is radically alter for every other. Its the excess thats everywhere, not interruptive (Derrida). Fissures human life since it constitutes human action. 2. But the meaning of the negativity = its universality, its being recognizednegativity is nothing on its own [abstract negativity]. So it gets its universality and being from that which it radically is not. 3. The two moments are logically inseparable. => Each action is a confession and each mutual recognition is a forgiveness: spontaneous, negative, beyond any universality. 4. There exists a radical form of dependence: originary indebtednessabsolute dependence without which I couldnt act or mean at all. 5. The secret of Hegel is in the hard hearts delay. []: youre always in one of those roles or the other (T4A.138] You cant make your dependence a mode of the realization of freedom. To recognize at all is (quite secularly) to forgive: it takes the negative in a moment of active forgetfulness, I make the transgression count for nothing [negate the negation]. 6. What makes the otherness of the other absolute is that its a negativity with respect to me. Different from Derrida and Levinas. God cant be absolute other because Hes not negative. 7. [T4A.193] Negativity, death are constitutive of the universality of Spirit. 8. Forgiveness, recognition, is action about action: its not an immediate element of human activity, but emerges as a relocation of ourselves with respect to others. I.e. we have a notion of our negativity through that which it must necessarily deny. [check the tape] 9. Transgression, forgiveness are the paradigm types of separating (transgression) or connecting (recognition). But connecting- forgiveness is also a negativity, else its a formula. And transgression is connection. 10. a) ethical: (1) transgression: connection:: (2) philosophy: art b) speculation 11. The whole is ethical: we come to perceive the meaning and [] of our existence: Spirit. 12. The type of all particularity is transgressive action. The type of all universality is forgiveness. 13. Self-recognition in absolute otherness a) Weve gotten the beginning formula. Its crucial to keep the absolute. 14. [8-0:24:44] We get rid of skepticism via forgiveness (but its how we got there). 15. Why is there a Chapter on Religion? 16. Consciousness > Spirit: Subject is Substance a) Humanity is divinized. b) Is this compatible with our original beliefs about Substance? 17. Religion: Substance is Subject
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a) [8-0:27:00] Divinity is humanized. 18. Classical atheism and theism are metaphysical in the wrong way. They exclude {absence, loss, negativity} and opt for self- presence. Essence without negativity, loss, absence. Atheism is in the grip of theisms as pure insight is in the grip of Faith. You cant have simple reversal. a) Hegel wants us to think religiously in order to critique religion. 19. Nietzsche is a religious thinker because he asks How can I believe in my beliefs? If I dont believe in them, Im nihilistic. Nietzsche isnt theological; he doesnt propose a theological solution. Theology is a philosophy (based on Plato and Aristotle) of religious thought. 20. [8-0:31:09] Religion chapter: We discover Spirit taking itself as its own object. Were already into Spirit that knows itself as Spirit and are looking at the different ways Spirit represents itself to itself. a) Subjective Spirit: psychology b) Objective Spirit: morals, politics, history c) Absolute Spirit: representation of Spirit to itself: Art, religion, philosophy. 21. The move to religion is where he stops doing phenomenology as such. 22. Religions are self-representations of Spirit that dont know that thats what they are. 23. Hegels conception of religion is Durkheimian. Religions are societys representations of itself Hegel and Durkheim differ on the definition of sociology. 24. [9-0:38:17] ] Jacobi (Natural) a) God is pure immediate being. Divine is nature. 25. Schiller-Schelling (Art) a) Artificer. Spirit knows Spirit. b) Epic-tragedy-comedy (Substance<>Subject) suppress lyric, which is feminized via Sappho? c) E.g. Aristophanes brings high things low. d) Greek comedy is atheism, but potentially nihilistic in the same way as pure insight. Its a self-sufficient humanism that has no concept of negativity as constitutive. Greek comedy is over-ind., reductive, stuck in picture thinking. 26. Kant-Kierkegaard (Revealed) a) #759: Christianity embedded an insight into the deep structures of human experience. b) The movement of Christianity is when one man, Christ, becomes all men. c) #762: Problem is that theres only one Jesus. Its not yet Notionalwere trapped at the level of perception. How do you know Jesus is God? That immediacy cant be how the claim to universality is established. d) #763: Jesus must die, pass over into having been. e) #765: Picture-thinking is merely representational. How to make sense of indifferences: God the Son, God the Father? f) #781: The Church. Theres no meaning to Christianity without the Church = religious community. The truth of Christianity is in the community, but the community still takes itself as finite, fully bodily and erotic. and so separate from God. g) #784: Protestant inwardization of the relation to the absolute becomes a question of faith. Overcoming representation is the movement from one to all. h) Evil is nature and self-assertion in this articulation. These are Original Sin. i) #780: Christs going back into God is like my going into myself. So my self-assertion has something to do with divinity. (1) => There is no fall and theres no original evil. Evil = goodness. (2) But this isnt radical enough. Need to make evil constitutive. j) Same logic as Antigone and Creon, so Hegel is saying Christianity got it wrong the same way as the Greeks. Christianity is worse because it reified its negativityno forgiveness: hypocrisy: a claim to non-judgmentalness that is self-assertion. This is a radical critique of
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Christianity, both in terms of its structures and, as well see, its terms of representational selfunderstanding. 27. tape 4 a) Heideggers worried about the thought of indebtedness and wants the notion of an original gift. One might think forgiveness was an original gift. Heidegger argues for the notion of the originary gift which, as he says, breaks the circuit of exchange. Im suggesting that forgiveness is both originary and that in being forgiven I incur my debt. So although forgiveness is spontaneous its a response to the unwritten law (Antigone). The unwritten law, Im claiming, is the movement of transgression and forgiveness. Theres no representation of that thats going to be adequate to []. Rather that movement itself as unwritten is what allows there to be perpetual movement. Thats why Im saying theres an excessive character to human activity. Transgression that claims universality demands recognition Conversely, forgiveness which looks like the most spontaneous and God did it (something we cant do: God absolves us of all our sins. If I forgive you, being human beings you feel that your reentry back into the community is dependent on me, so theres a kind of indebtedness. So something that is a freely given gift, and I cant just give the gift since my spontaneity itself is indebted, so Im saying that the notion of gift and debt cannot be logically untangled in a way that Derrida wants to do, for Hegelian. If youre looking at this from a Derridean angle, that would be your criticism: surely now we have a restricted economy. Weve got the same. Im claiming we have a system all right that has the claim to closure of a certain kind, but it doesnt have a reductive nature because one of the moments in it is absolute transgression. b) Im trying to make the argument that, rather counterintuitively, objective idealism is the structure of the breakdown between inside and outside. Im claiming that structurally its like Derrideanism in that way, its like deconstruction: the breakdown of the absolute inside and the absolute outside. But Im claiming that its non-skeptical. Im claiming that this tension between the inside and the outside, transgression and forgiveness, etc., is constitutive of knowing about being in the world and not having this something we never reach. The something we never reach is ourselves in the sense that we are these transgressive beings. c) Because theres no absolute externality between any cultural forms, [absolute knowing] in order for me to be in relation to myself I have to be in relationship to this past which is my opposite in a certain way. Im saying that [] a microstructure of action, transgression and forgiveness, figures all the fundamental structures of human existence. Thats the big claim. Absurd it may be, but thats the claim.
B. Absolute Knowing
1. [8-1:00:31] We have seen Subject become Substance, that is, recognized that Spirit is the ground of self-possession, that it is through Spirit that were anchored in the world, that Spirit is nothing but us in our complex relations with others. And now too weve seen Substance become Subject. In the preface Hegel says that he wants to show that Substance is Subject and Subject is Substance, so it looks like hes done it. Humanity has been divinized and divinity humanized. In principle thats what weve seen, but not completely. Because, more or less, religious consciousness as religious still regards the absolute as staying outside as mystery. As a picture or object of consciousness. And this mysteriousness, this representational construal and this is the origin of representationis marked by a temporal deferment. That is, that salvationwhen I shall be at one with the absolute, that is, the day of judgmentis in the future. So religion qua religion reveals its inadequacy through its temporal time design. And this is whats really going on in the last paragraph of the section on religion where hes saying: a) (#787) It obtains satisfaction by externally attaching to its pure negativity the positive meaning of the unity of itself with the essential Being; its satisfaction thus itself remains burdened with the antithesis of a beyond.
How many times have we seen these beyonds? But now this is beyond time.
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b) Its own reconciliation therefore enters its consciousness as something distant, as something in the
distant future, just as the reconciliation which the other Self achieved appears as something in the distant past [God becoming man].
2. What Im suggesting then is the thought of representation, the idea of salvation in the future, is that the notion of a representational relationship to the object is bound to a certain conception of temporality. 3. We have to kill Christ as an external representation if the claim of universality is going to be true. What it is to kill Christ is to overcome that externality. The process of overcoming externality is inwardizing, but the ultimate block to all inwardizing is the temporal time design of Christian belief, namely: There shall be salvation in the future. So overcoming the temporal time design is going to allow us to be able to come to see...let me put it this way: the translation of the temporal time design into a conceptual time design, whatever that means, is the central work of the final chapter. Part of the work of the chapter though, or what that work involves, is just the recognition of the language of the collaboration of the two dialectics we already looked atSubstance <> Subjectleaves only the religious time design as a blockage to their unification. That is, the big thing about the religion chapter I gave you an indication how it repeats at the level of religion the movement of Subject becoming Substance, so hes actually followed the two parallel paths. In one hes ended up with forgiveness and mutual recognition which is never quite mutual and never quite recognition. What blocks that in the case of religion is the temporal time design. a) So it looks as if to be able to see that the movement of Subject <> Substance are intrinsically the same movement, which is what Absolute Knowing would be, it looks as if only the religious time design is left out here. 4. He goes through a variety of steps to show the unity of these two movements. So the unity [] overcome the blockage, and thats what we have to see. To see that how we can see the who-weare which has come to be substance, and how we come to see that what religion really is (Subject), that these two movements are the same. So the first step in this movement is the recollection of the recollections which form the Phenomenology. The Phenomenology is nothing but the recollection of past forms of behavior, past shapes of consciousness, and now we are recollecting them, recalling them in their structural order, and thats what happens in #797 and #798. 5. The second step, and I have to admit that this is one of the moments where I feel uneasy, but I think this is whats going on, concerns #796. Here I take the argument and notice the repetition of the problems of evil and forgiveness, negativity here. The argument of this paragraph is coming to identify the Christ of chapter 7 with the beautiful soul of chapter 6. And theres good reason. I think, in the Spirit of Christianity in the State, the original model for the beautiful soul is Christ. And that what Hegel plainly doesnt like about Christianity is this purity and this turning the other cheek and this denial of negativity as intrinsic to it. In the spirit of Christianity in the State he explicates that as the reason for the collapse of Christianity. Remember, he poses Christianity against Kantianism: theres no duty and things are done for love. But then they reify the love into a notion of purity which has a kind of selflessness to it. 6. The thought here is that the Christ of chapter 7 is shown to be a kind of beautiful soul in #796 and that in a certain sense, unsurprisingly, what happens to the beautiful soul must happen to Christ as well. Which in a way did: Christ did evaporate into the sky and disappear. But the meaning of that must be a letting go of that purity and acknowledging mediation and evil as intrinsic to it, bringing out what I call the subthesis about original sin now going back to the purity of Christ. In a senseand this may be too metaphorical for beliefthe difference between the religious and nonreligious representations for this movement forgive one another for their differences. 7. Once you overcome the fall from purity, once you recognize Christ as a kind of Beautiful Soul, it makes the overcoming of that makes the movement of the overcoming of Christianity the same
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as the movement of the beautiful soul, then the difference between those two movements collapses. 8. The next step must be one in which we explicitly overcome the bad infinity of the religious time design. Its a bad infinity because fusion with God, redemption, salvation, God and man being one is infinitely delayed. This requires two steps. First by recognizing that we are the Concept. This is #796, #797. a) (#796) This Notion fulfilled itself on one side in the self-assured Spirit that acted, and on the other, in religion: in religion it won for consciousness the absolute content as content or, in the form of picture-thinking, the form of otherness for consciousness; on the other hand, in the prior shape the form is that of the Self itself, for it contains the self-assured Spirit that acts; the Self accomplishes the life of absolute Spirit.
What hes driving towards is that we have to get rid of the sense that the Concept could be different from the self, and that means overcoming that picture-thought.
b) (#801) Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty
intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Concept, i.e. has not annulled Time. It is the outer, intuited pure Self which is not grasped by the Self, the merely intuited Concept; when this latter grasps itself it sets aside its Time-form, comprehends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuiting. Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself.
Whats the argument here? A lot of anti-hegelianism depends on the thought that whats going on in this passage is an absolute escape from time. He seems to be saying that. Something goes wrong until time has been annulled, cancelled, sublated. Of course, this is how Kojve makes explicit Time only exists insofar as there is error; insofar as fundamental error is overcome, all the misrepresentations of the Absolute, then Time and History end. Hence this passage is the source of all that stuff about the end of History. Along with his Philosophy of History, of course. Time stops, weve got the Absolute, History ends, its great for everyone. Kojve goes on to become one of the designers of the EEC. Scary, isnt it? Oh yeah, Kojve's scary. Is that what Hegel says? I think all that is a misreading of this passage. This passage is a critique of Kantianism. For Kant, and only for Kant, is it true that time is a form of empty intuition. He is the only philosopher in the history of the world who has said that. But what he says in saying that is true of all pre-Hegelian accounts of Time. Namely, its the picture of Time as a container, Time as a form independently of its contents. Therefore we have to read this sentence differently. He says: Time is the Concept itself that is there comma and its clear in the German, but Im taking that and which is a kind of aber, but. Time is the Concept which itself is there, Dasein, but which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition. Therefore what weve been doing is reading these eventsthe Greek world, followed by the Roman world, followed by the nobles, followed by the French Revolution, followed by German Idealismas events occurring in Time. Thats the mistake. There is no in Time. Rather the Concept is Time, that is, Time is the Concept itself which misrepresents itself in its unfolding. So Spirit is History, and the Concept is History not, as it were, accidentally, but intrinsically. That is, the movement here is not from Time to Eternity, but from Time as a container, but to time as temporality, or Time as historicity itself. And of course, if Im right about this structure of actionthe meaning of Spirit being transgression and forgivenessthat is itself a structure of ongoing movement. Now of course there is a reflective comprehension of that. But that reflective comprehension of that, the philosophical understanding of that, is itself dependent on a history from which it cannot detach itself. This leads to simply two thoughts. On the one hand, originally Spirit appears not as History, but as in History, in a neutral temporal continuum. Indeed, up until this moment, no moment of Spirit is understood as a radically historical form of social life. Indeed, every form of social life
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we looked at wants to put an end to Time, wants an end of history. Thats because they refuse to identify Substance as Subject with its own negativity. So the trope of the end of History, of the refusal of temporality is what the book is all about; not its goal, but its enemy. Hence in each case the history that Spirit actually is is concealed by the truth Concept of each particular historical formation. Spirit is History, but presents itself as discrete, ahistorical, concrete formations. And thats not accidental, but, we can now see, necessary for there to be Spirit at all. That is, no matter how mediated....[whodunit joke] The necessity thats misunderstood, and theres a reason for this essential misunderstanding: although every act of transgressionand making the claim to universality is always already mediated, is always already historicalit must lay claim to the notion of truth and have an immediacy. That is, the notion of immediacy is not itself eliminable. That is, somehow people think that because there is universal mediation that somehow everything is related to everything else and you get something like Derridas notion of dissemination which really has these blocks or articulations or cuts in it that could be here, there, or anywhere. But thats a denial that immediacy matters and is a moment. Because when Picasso does his Cubist paintings, or Joyce writes Finnegans Wake, or whatever, or someone says Look, skin is our criterion for moral treatment thats not merely an historically mediated something, even though we require that to be understood. Its a claim to truth and therefore not reducible to its conditions. Hence the significance of transgressivity. Transgressivity is not the mere going beyond the law, but allowing there to be law as law, that is as legislation that is a claim to truth, and not merely another unfolding in a disseminating chain. So the fact that Spirit hides itself behind immediacy is not accidental to the structure of Spirit. There is a moment of immediacy which is necessary to the moment of Truth, but weve learned thats not incompatible with historicality, historicity as such. Indeed, its only possible in terms of historicity as such. Hence the Time that gets annulled in #801 is Time as a succession of nows, Time as a form of intuition. What gets revealed is authentic historicity, historicality. The annulment of inauthentic Time is equally therefore the beginning of authentic Time, which is why Hegel says at the very beginning of the book This is a birth time. He doesnt say hes ending History, he actually says this is a birth time, the beginning of a new epoch. He says that because he thinks were History in the sense of living historically, that is, living a spiritual existence has not yet happened. Rather, up till now weve been living like beasts, because weve been living naturally in the sense that weve been putting something non-human, something transcendent or an absolute, above us. Our insight into this structure [Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit], this notion of Absolute Spirit. What weve seen now is that Art and Religion are inadequate forms because representational, where the notion of being representational is a problem with their temporality. Representational discourse presupposes a bad theory of Time. Philosophy, the Concept, is the thought of historicality as historical. But that thinking which is, lets admit it, a negativity in relationship to the history that grounded it is only possible through that very history. Hence Hegel is not claiming that when we reach Absolute Spirit, and this is again the classical conservative reading of Hegel: Oh yeah. Im now at home in the world. Its cool. I understand negativity: negativity is a part of life. Peace, brother. And of course they take it that recognition of self in absolute otherness, once Ive got that Ah, I see. So I dont have to worry that youre being absolutely other it all stops. Im claiming that that philosophical insight is itself only possible on the basis of a concrete historical existence to which it must return. Philosophy is, Hegel says, History comprehended. But that comprehension is a revelation of historicality, and therefore negativity, which pushes philosophy back into the history from which it began. Which again, if you read the preface carefully, is exactly what Hegel says: that philosophy must
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return to experience and become its ether. So neither Objective Spirit, political and historical life, is not self-sufficient. And thats a critique, you might say, of a certain kind of modern pragmatism: that they require philosophical comprehension for their meaning, butand this is the bad news for philosophyphilosophy, with Hegel, is revealed as itself not self-sufficient. Philosophy is always in relationship to its other, must care for, remember, mourn its other, is responsible for its other. And that responsibility, as in Antigones burial of Polynices, that work of memory is the work of philosophy, the work of mourning. Philosophy which takes wing only at dusk is fundamentally the work of mourning, the preservation of the meaning and significance of History. But that is only significant with respect to History. What philosophy does is permit Antigone to bury Polynices and return to the city, which is her home.

Notes On Phenomenology

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78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein I.

III. 3/15/94 A. introduction to the course

78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein

B. Early Theological Writings: The Spirit of Christianity

C. Kants Moral Theory

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IV. 3/17/94 A. [1-1:15:00] preliminary

C. Early Theological Writings: The Spirit of Christianity

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D. preliminary to Phenomenology [1-1:44:00]

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D. Force and the Understanding

B. The Truth of Self-Certainty

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78679884.doc J.M. Bernstein VIII. 4/7/94

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B. Self-Alienated Spirit. Culture.

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B. Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality.

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