No More Learning

According to Bloom, and substituting philosophy for poetry, philosophical history is "indistinguishable from [philosophical] influence, since strong [philosophers] make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves"(1973/1997: 5). If this thesis can rightly be applied to philosophical history, it would be more accurate - or at least more fruitful - to view Hegel's early critique of his contemporaries as having less to do with them and more to do with himself. (This in no wise trivializes Hegel's accomplishment. ) Hegel was, borrowing Bloom's adjective, a "strong" philosopher; thus rather than idealizing his influences, by whom he was formed and malformed, Hegel appropriated them for himself. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel offers a philosophical interpretation of what he then considered the "present state of philosophy. " Rather than merely expositing upon or simply rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel re-reads - perhaps even revises as he appropriates them - "plastically" with an eye toward a speculative "Aufhebung. " To
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 133
view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a misreading, therefore, which constitutes something akin to a cottage industry among historians of philosophy,1 misses the critical point of the Critical Journal of Philosophy as well as what is most instructive in Hegel's critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity.
So while I have been interested in the accuracy of Hegel's interpretation of Kant and Jacobi as well as Schleiermacher and Fichte in Faith and Knowledge, that has not been my only concern: Reading misreading teaches us more about the one misreading than it does about those misread. Strong philosophers, such as Hegel, like Bloom's "strong poets," are never disinterested readers of philosophy, nor are they philosophical critics "qua common readers raised to the highest power. " In A Map of Misreading, Bloom suggests that:
The strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the revisionist, who wishes to find his own original relation to truth, whether in texts or in reality (which he treats as texts anyway), but also wishes to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the suffering of history (1975a: 3- 4).
In the work of their precursors, a strong reader discovers not only their "own rejected thoughts, [which] come back to [them] with a certain alienated majesty," as Emerson put it, but they search also for the place where the precursor shall be overthrown. Hegel, I have discovered, is an apotheosis of philosophical strength. In general, the issue is simply one's relation to tradition, particularly as embodied in a figure taken to be one's own frontrunner. Among other things, Faith and Knowledge demonstrates Hegel's effort to swerve away from if not appropriate so as to overcome his precursors.
1 Although I have alluded to the varied allegations that Hegel misread, perhaps egregiously, the philosophers that he read, perhaps it is worth reiterating here: not only did Jacobi and Fichte as well as Schleiermacher and Schelling claim that Hegel misunderstood or at least misrepresented their thought, as contemporaries, but the most recent complaints against Hegel in the English literature come from di Giovanni (1995, 1997, 2005) apropos of Jacobi, Breazeale (1988a, 1994) with respect to Fichte as well as Reinhold, Crouter ( 1980, 1996) concerning Hegel's reading of Schleiermacher, and Vater (1978) if not also Fackenheim (1996) when it comes to Hegel's critique of Schelling.
? 134 Conclusion
Philosophical misreading is inevitable not only because the scholarly project of "rediscovering the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his [or her] audience" (Parry, 1971: 2), which assumes a fairly traditional notion of what criticism is about, it is impossible also, and quite possibly in principle, because (a) every strong reading insists upon itself, which is to say that it involuntarily assumes its own superiority or denies its own partiality, (b) we read in ways that chiefly reveal the shape of our own countenance, (c) texts are not substances but inter-textual events, (d) all readings overload certain features of the precursor text with meaning, (e) all readings trigger ambivalent psycho-linguistic defense strategies against influence and belatedness and (f) because epigones read their precursors so as to overcome them or otherwise clear imaginative space for themselves. But even if all strong readings were a misreading of a kind, since philosophical reading is all-but-impossible, that is not to say that there are not better and worse readings. On the contrary, recognizing our tendency to misread - whether because we have lost "the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" or because we recognize that "there is no such thing as a disinterested reader" or even as a means of staking a claim to an intellectual territory - is at the very core of our task of an increasingly more accurate reading of Hegel's philosophical corpus. The central task of Hegel scholarship since the time of Dilthey, suggests Dieter Henrich, has consisted in solving the 'secret of Hegel' by means untangling [entra? tzeln] the historical influences on Hegel in addition to the systematic interpretation of his texts (1975: 41). But the systematic interpretation of texts, in this case Hegel's Glauben und Wissen, is not merely a matter of source studies; an interpretation of Hegel's texts also requires comparative analysis as - following Bloom - an inter-textual event. The profundities of philosophical influence cannot be reduced to source-study, or to the history of ideas, but rather the study of the life-cycle of the philosopher as well as the context within which that life-cycle is enacted and the dialectical relations between philosophers. Belatedness, for Bloom, is less a question of historical conditions than something that belongs to the literary if not also philosophical situation as such; and indeed, a more honest assessment of the anxiety of influence, in Hegel, or in ourselves, "might partly cleanse us of the resentment of scholarly belatedness. " Once we realize that we simply cannot escape the predicament of misreading, however, we begin to read "more strenuously and more audaciously" (1975: 48).
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 135
Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay, as I have read it, strongly or weakly, should be read as a speculative elegy or a sustained meditation on philosophical death. Not only does Hegel pronounce the 'death of God,' which is related to the death of speculative philosophy, or the surrendering of philosophy to faith or practical theology, thus hailing the death of faith as well as the death of reason, he must have anticipated also his own death - i. e. , the constriction of creative space and a growing desert within2 - as a philosopher. Hegel hovers over the corpse of faith and reason; indeed, he dissuades us from quickly turning away from the grief indicative of the Passover and taking refuge instead in the joy of Easter. Despite the optimistic flurry of the final paragraphs of Glauben und Wissen, Hegel may well have doubted that a resurrection was possible at all. Hegel is fixated on the corpse; though he believes, or half-believes, that speculation can achieve what reflection could not, and while he has a vague inkling of the alchemic formula by which he plans revive the corpse that lay before him, Hegel was, at this stage in his epicycle, and to borrow a literary image from Goethe, a sorcerer's apprentice without a sorcerer. Hegel must have doubted his ability; that Hegel survived this surfeit or glut of philosophical history, what Nietzsche called the "bersa? ttigung der Historie," which is pernicious and altogether hostile to life, is difficult to fully appreciate. In his Kabbalah and Criticism, with reference to the Gnostic concept of happening, Bloom suggests that
When you know the precursor and the ephebe, you know [philosophical] history, but your knowing is as critical an event in that history as was the ephebe's knowing of the precursor. The remedy for literary history then is to convert its concepts from the category of being into the category of happening. To see the history of [philosophy] as an endless, defensive civil war, indeed a family war, is to see that every idea of history relevant to the history of [philosophy] must be a concept of happening. That is, when you know the influence relation between two [philosophers], your knowing is a conceptualization, and your conceptualization (or misreading) is itself an event in the literary history that you are writing . . . . Therefore the relation of the earlier to the later [philosopher] is exactly analogous to the relation of the later [philosopher] to yourself. The ephebe's misreading of the precursor is the paradigm for your misreading of the ephebe. . . . The same
2 Recall Nietzsche's claim, in his Dithyrambs of Dionysus, namely, "The desert grows: woe to him who harbours deserts! Stone grates on stone, the desert swallows down. And death that chews, whose life is chewing, gazes upon it, monstrous, glowing brown . . . " [Die Wu? ste wa? chst: weh dem, der Wu? sten birgt! Stein knirscht an Stein, die Wu? ste schlingt und wu? rgt. Der ungeheure Tod blickt glu? hend braun und kaut --, sein Leben ist sein Kaun . . ] (2004: 38).
? 136
Conclusion
figurations of belatedness govern revisionary reading as govern revisionary writing. To interpret is to revise is to defend against influence. We are back at the Gnostic formulation that all reading, and all writing, constitutes a kind of defensive warfare, that reading is mis-writing and writing is mis- reading (1975: 31).
Hegel lived in the space and time of philosophical geniuses; this proximity to genius, whether Kant or Schelling, wrote Emerson, who is Nietzsche's brilliant precursor, "engrosses our attention and thus prevents a due inspection of ourselves - they prejudice our judgment in favor of their abilities, so lessen the sense of our own, and they intimidate us with the splendor of their renown. " To the extent that the precursor is internalized, Bloom claims, "a crucial mental space in the ephebe has been voided" (1975: 41). Misreading arises from defense mechanisms of various sorts, certainly, and the reader is anxiously if not neurotically defending himself or herself against further loss, a lack of breathing space, creative paralysis, and ultimately, for Bloom, drawing on Freud, "the heart of all influence- anxiety is the deep, hidden identity between all psychic defense and the fear of dying. " Though Freud has very little that is positive about creativity as an intellectual process, he was himself quite creative in showing, claims Bloom in Agon,
the priority of anxiety over its stimuli, and who both imagines the origins of consciousness as a catastrophe and then relates that catastrophe to repetition-compulsion, to the drive-toward-death, an agon directed not only against death but against the achievement of anteriority, of others, and even of one's own earlier self (1982: 97).
In his effort to create imaginative breathing space for himself, Hegel interpreted his precursors defensively, which is to say that he misread them, and also denigrated their respective achievements; perhaps these hermeneutical swerves were unavoidable if not unintentional. But Hegel also fails quite conspicuously to acknowledge their collective influence on what he wished to claim for himself, e. g. , the dialogical principle of mutual recognition [Anerkennung] and intersubjectivity. Perhaps Hegel repressed, sub-consciously or otherwise, this golden threat in order to weave his 'mis-reconciliationist thesis' in Glauben und Wissen. Collectively, the philosophers Hegel examines in Glauben und Wissen exemplify or otherwise represent what Buber called the "history of the dialogical principle" (1947: 249 ff. ). This is particularly true in the case of Jacobi, as has been noted by di Giovanni, but it is also true in the case of Kant and Fichte if not also Schleiermacher. And indeed, this unacknowledged
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 137
speculative advance within Reflexionsphilosophie constitutes one of the most philosophically fertile sections of the Phenomenology. The dialectical achievement of the Phenomenology consists in a confluence of influences from Kant's reflections on the antinomies and Jacobi's charge of nihilism to Schleiermacher's proposed ideal-realism and Fichte's ethical solution to the problem of solipsism; but the discovery of the dialectic, or the positive as opposed to the merely negative rational moment, arose out of Hegel's post-Jena swerve away from Schelling's account of intellectual intuition.
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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