No More Learning

Perhaps it is fair for us to read Hegel as Hegel read his precursors. Indeed, Bloom claims that "[t]he ephebe's misreading of the precursor is the paradigm for your own misreading of the precursor. " But even if it would be fair to read Hegel as Hegel read his precursors, such a reading of Hegel strikes me as unlikely if not impossible. I must admit that my own reading of Hegel is weak rather than strong: the greater one's self-doubt, the more preoccupied one becomes with accuracy, with getting it right, the weaker one's reading becomes; and a weak reading is hardly worth the bother. 3 Bloom claims that a strong reading doesn't ever ask whether his or her interpretation is right, since strong readers know that their reading is right (1982: 19-20). In an effort to get it right, ironically, one reads poorly. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests - in One of Hegel's Bons Mots - that to "read Hegel's text is thus, if not to rewrite it, at least to repeat its exposition plastically" (2001: 13). Nancy is following Hegel's own conviction that a text must "be read over and over [wiederholt gelesen werden] before it can be understood" (Hegel: 1806, 39) - i. e. , before "philosophical exposition can . . . achieve the goal of plasticity [plastisch]" (1806: 40), which is necessary for what Nancy calls "the work of Aufhebung" or "the speculative act. "
Hegel's Faith and Knowledge is important to our understanding of the remainder of the Hegelian corpus: it serves as a bold expression of the speculative task that was to preoccupy if not haunt Hegel for the rest of his
3 In Agon, Bloom claims that "[s]trong reading knows that what it does to the poem is right, because it knows what Emerson, its American inventor, taught it, which is that the true ship is the shipbuilder. If you don't believe in your reading, then don't bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don't care also whether anyone else agrees or not. If it is strong enough, then they will come round to it anyway, and yous should just shrug when they tell you finally that it is a right reading. Of course it isn't, because right reading is not reading well, and can be left, as Yeats grandly would have said, to our servants, except that we haven't got any servants" (1982: 20).
? 138 Conclusion
days. Hegel here implements for the first time the dialectical strategy by which philosophical reflection was to set about reflecting itself out of the limitations of reflection itself; that strategy aimed not only at apprehending the Absolute, but apprehending it in such a manner as to keep it on this side of consciousness - i. e. , "completely determined, exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned by all. "4 Without a systematic sublimation of the illusion, thought remains indeterminate, esoteric and incomprehensible; until the infinite "consumes and consummates finitude," philosophy collapses into poetry - i. e. , philosophers become, as Plato put it, "diviners and soothsayers who say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. " Hegel had longed since his days at Tu? bingen for "the free upsurge of the most various living shapes in the philosophical gardens of [ancient] Greece," but all around him he saw only "the tortures of the damned. " But it was at such moments as these, he thought, when submerged and crushed by the sheer tedium of the sciences as well as the impending death of speculative reason, that the spirit of philosophy feels the strength of her growing wings most acutely (1802a: 284). At the time that he wrote Glauben und Wissen, and for many years to come, Hegel was still hovering over the corpse in question. Reconciling faith and reason, or resuscitating the proverbial corpse of faith and reason, then, as now, was no easy task: indeed, as a result (i. e. , as the product of the "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative"), it is - says Hegel, perhaps thinking of Spinoza's claim that 'all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare' - "the hardest thing of all. "5
? 4 Hegel, Pha? nomenologie, Vorrede, XIII,
5 Hegel, Phenomenology, 14: 'To judge that a thing has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgment and comprehension in a definite description is the hardest thing of all. '
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