No More Learning

24 Z2.
? Resuscitating the Corpse of Faith and Reason 125
To reflect oneself beyond the limits of reflection, which is how Heidegger characterized the Hegelian strategy, one must reflect on the limits of reflection itself; this was the ostensive purpose and sustained labor of Faith and Knowledge. But Hegel is interested also in the process by which "the infinite consumes and consummates finite"; this is what one finds, allegedly, in the Phenomenology. (The finest expression of Hegel's speculative religion is found in his Foreword to H. Fr. W. Hinrich's 1822 Die Religion im inneren Verhaeltnisse zur Wissenschaft, which serves as his final published formulation of his reconciliation of faith and knowledge, and the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. ) For the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, which for Hegel is "by no means a restricted expression of the spirit of a brief epoch or small group," philosophy no longer aimed at the cognition of God but rather - and only - the cognition of the person. For the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, complains Hegel, the person is no longer a glowing spark of eternal beauty or a spiritual focus of the universe but merely an absolute sensibility. When steeped in finitude, religion has its sublime aspect in feeling alone; resigned to its restriction to the sensuous, wrote the critical journalists, "philosophy prettifies herself with the surface color of the supersensuous by pointing, in faith, to something higher. " At its best, these philosophies acknowledge that although the absolute identity exists only for faith, it ought to exist for cognition and knowledge; the task of constructing identity and integration simply cannot be performed. In these philosophies, then, the supersensuous world is only the flight from the sensuous world. Cognizant only of the fact that it cannot cognize the absolute, philosophy takes up an edifying role and tries to meet the need of the age by slipping God in 'through the back door of faith. '25 In an attempt to tear persons away from the sensuous and to direct their gaze to the stars, suggests Hegel, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity reaffirm what thought had put asunder and restore the feeling of essential being; in this way, these philosophies "arouse the desire to bite but offer nothing to eat. "26 In the reflective philosophies of subjectivity,
spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss. 27
25 Schelling and Hegel (1802c), 369.
26 This is how Hegel characterizes the reflective philosophies of subjectivity in his Preface to the Phenomenology, see pp. 4-6, ? ? 7-10.
27 Hegel, Phaen. , VIII.
? 126 Chapter Six
This, then, is the life of spirit for an age which denies itself the rational cognition of the absolute; even worse, this resignation to finitude is construed as piety: 'by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding,' we become the beloved of God. The intensity of our feeling, because it is without a core, writes Hegel, is 'a rapturous haziness' that 'is in no way distinguishable from superficiality. ' The religious attitude consists, thinks Hegel, precisely in its flight from the inward feeling that 'God Himself is dead' and, outwardly, a premonition that nature "signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man" (1802b: 190). 28 Emptied of objective content, faith and reason are inadequately - because unsustainably - reconciled. In Glauben und Wissen, argues Hodgson, "the concept of absolute spirit is present - it is the true infinite that includes finitude within itself and overcomes it - but the category 'spirit' is itself lacking. "29 By the time he wrote the Foreward essay, Hegel was committed to a notion of faith "as involving both phases [objectivity and subjectivity], the one just as much as the other, and I place them together, bound up in a differentiated unity [in unterschiedener Einheit]. "30
6. 5 The "spring of that finitude which is infinity"
The goal of speculative religion, says Hegel, consists in sublating the "negation of my particular, empirical existence" (1802a: 218). Speculative thought overcomes the decisive one-sidedness of human subjectivity as manifested in reflectivity and conceptually cognizes the unity of the finite and the infinite. 31 As Hegel puts it in his 1821 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, philosophy should conceive of religion as reconciled with reason: 'Instead [of allowing] reason and religion to contradict themselves,
28 Hegel is here citing Pascal's Pensees, 441 (Brunschvicg). For an excellent analysis of Hegel's utterance that 'God is dead,' see Deland Anderson's Hegel's Speculative Friday (Scholars Press, 2003). Also see Cyril O'Regan, "Philosophy of Religion in the Context of Hegel's Philosophy," Owl of Minerva, 2006, Vol. 37: 1, 24: "In opposition to the rationalistic reduction of faith, which Hegel regarded as characteristic of Enlightenment culture, true philosophical knowledge depends on the religious consciousness and experience of the absolute - not an alien, transcendent, other-worldly absolute but an immanent absolute that subjects itself to negation in the historical Good Fridays of this world. "
29 Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18.
30 Hegel, Die Religion im inneren Verhaeltnisse zur Wissenschaft, 491.
31 See Merklinger, 41; LPR1, 1821, 221-2.
? Resuscitating the Corpse of Faith and Reason 127
[we must] resolve the discord in the manner [appropriate] to us - [through a] reconciliation in philosophy. '32 Within the sphere of religion, spirit is steeped in interiority, but Hegel argues that:
the interiority of devotion limited to emotion and representation is not the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation. 33
Thus, what was originally interior becomes even more internalized by being lifted up into self-determining thinking without losing its sense of adoration. 34
The speculative task consists in articulating conceptually what is already experienced in religion. According to the 1824 Concept of Religion, 'religion is the self-knowing of divine spirit through the mediation of finite spirit'; in the 1824 lectures, religion is the 'consciousness of the true in and for itself' and 'the self-consciousness of absolute spirit. ' The speculative philosophy of religion is one which recognizes that the two sides [one which treats merely the objects as such as God and forget the subjective side as did the Enlightenment, and one which considered and comprehended religion only as something subjective as does Pietism] are united together in a dialectical relationship that is the totality of religion. This dialectic is grounded in thought: it is necessary to understand that 'God and religion exist in and through thought - simply and solely in and for thought. ' The unity of these two sides takes place within religious consciousness:35
In religion, I myself am the relation of the two sides [the singularity of the individual human subject and the absolute universality of this other- the two-sided relation implicit in consciousness] thus defined. I the thinking subject, and I the immediate subject, are one and the same I. And further,
32 LPR, 111.
33 Hegel, Vorstellung u? ber die Aesthetik, vol. 1, 143; Quoted in Lauer's Hegel's Concept of God, 36-7.
34 In direct response to Schleiermacher, Hegel claims - LPR11, 1824, 263 - that "only when the thought is true are one's feelings truthful too" (quoted in Merklinger, 208, ftn. 13).
35 Hegel insists time after time that "religion is human religion," see LPR111, 1824, p. 189
? 128 Chapter Six
the relation of the two sides that are so sharply opposed [of utterly finite consciousness and being and of the infinite] is present in religion for me. 36
And again,
In thinking, I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition. 37
In essence, the subject experiences a simultaneous internal rupture and consociation: 'I am the conflict . . . and their bonding together. '38 Because the inner conflict exists as relation and as unity, it is also a unity-in- difference. It is in these terms, then, that we are to understand the relationship of - drawing on Fichte's description of intellectual intuition - 'the I as the knowing and the known object'39 and - drawing on Aristotle's description of divine activity - 'thought thinking itself. '40
The speculative reconciliation of faith and reason relies on a conception of religious consciousness as a concurrence of subjective feeling and objective content. And indeed, this conception of religious consciousness is not new to the later corpus; in his early 'Tu? bingen Fragment' (1793), Hegel claims that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse. "41 The Hegelian reconciliation between faith and knowledge involves a systematic understanding of the relationship between feeling and thought and, with that, the unity of the particular and the universal in religious consciousness. Within the sphere of religious consciousness, the consummation of the finite with the infinite requires philosophers of faith to move beyond a merely historical attitude towards the Absolute. 42 By piously adhering to "the unconditional requirement that the Absolute be kept outside oneself," by identifying the real with that which is independent or transcendent, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity inadvertently commit - suggest Hegel and Schelling - "the highest form of
36 Hegel, LPR1, 211. 37 Ibid. ,212.
38 Ibid. , 213.
39 Ibid. , 210.
40 Ibid. , 208.
41 Hegel, "Tu? bingen Fragment (1793), trans. H. S. Harris, in Hegel's Development, p. 511-512.
42 See LPR, p. 128; VPR1. p. 44.
? Resuscitating the Corpse of Faith and Reason 129
irreligiosity. "43 Hegel's theory of negation provides, speculatively, a mode of redemption from this form of irreligiosity as well as a prescription for resuscitating the corpse of faith and reason; speculative dialectics, in Hegel, provides a path leading toward that which
supersedes all dichotomy, for only that is in truth One and unchangeably the same. From it alone can a true universe of knowledge evolve, an all- encompassing structure. Only what proceeds from the absolute unity of the infinite and finite is . . . capable . . . of what every philosophy strives after, i. e. , of becoming in religion, or objectively, an eternal source of new intuition, and a universal model of everything in which human action endeavors to express and portray the harmony of the universe. 44
Genuine philosophy, writes Merklinger, attempts to "mirror speculatively the dialectical correlation of the finite human subject and the infinite divine object that takes place in and through religious consciousness" (1993: 23). In this way, thought Hegel, faith was transfigured into speculative vision. The moment of union, which is the result of intermediary stages, consists in the sublation of the division or scission of the finite and the infinite. The intermediary stages of this reconciliation, however, "cannot determine the meaning and the direction of the whole. "45 The reflective philosophers of subjectivity recognized, wrote Hegel, "that thinking is infinity, the negative side of the Absolute. " But construed speculatively, "[i]nfinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace" (1802b: 190).
? 43 See Schelling and Hegel (1802), 368 ff. 44 Ibid. , 373.
45 Schelling and Hegel (1802), 376.
CONCLUSION
ON THE CONTENTION AND CONFLUENCE OF INFLUENCE
Reading or misreading Hegel's (mis-)reading of his precursors in Glauben und Wissen represents a strenuous if not audacious strategy for illuminating the central concepts, as well as the point of the concepts, which animated Hegel's speculative reconciliation of faith and reason. As an interpretative thesis, Bloom's emphasis on the "anxiety of influence" and the corresponding "map of misreading" proves to be productive. This revisionist reading concludes by returning to Hegel's own critical theory, in which the dialectic extends beyond the negative and into the positive rational moment, which asks us to consider the conditions for the possibility of limitation and misreading, as an under-appreciated response if not solution to the paradox of philosophical misreading.
An accurate reading of Faith and Knowledge, I suggest, with a certain degree of trepidation, must include an examination of "influence" as itself influential in shaping Hegel's interpretive practice during this relatively early stage of his career. One of the central functions of the present analysis, though by no means its only function, is to draw attention to the phenomenon of belatedness and the anxiety of influence as decisive to Hegel's intellectual development. By the time he arrived in Jena, Hegel was in grave danger of being viewed and indeed viewing himself as a latecomer. Faith and Knowledge is ostensibly concerned with the influence of Hegel's contemporaries, primarily but not exclusively with Kant and Jacobi and Fichte. The unnamed target of Hegel's 1802 analysis, however, the darkest if not the longest shadow from which he would struggle to free himself, was quite probably Schelling.
Perhaps Nietzsche had Hegel in mind when he suggests that "[t]he belief that one is a late-comer [Spa? tling und Epigone] in the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading; but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the
132 Conclusion
wheel, as the meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world's history. " This anxiety of influence, and this "neat turn of the wheel," constitutes the central thematic preoccupation in what might otherwise appear to be a fairly straightforward reading of Faith and Knowledge. According to Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, "the revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as then to aim correctively. " On this definition, or formula, the critical journalists were themselves revisionists to the extreme. Perhaps it is fair for us to read Hegel as Hegel read his precursors. Hegel's philosophical exposition of Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which he undertakes on behalf of Aufhebung, sets a fair precedent for how to read Hegel: plastically, speculatively, critically. Although it is important to return to the text, and attend to what the text did say, it is possible - and I think helpful - to read the text differently. Wo? lfflin draws a useful hermeneutical distinction when he claims that:
[e]verything depends on how far a preponderating significance is assigned or withdrawn from the edges, whether they must be read as lines or not. In one case, the line means a track moving evenly around the form, to which the spectator can confidently entrust himself; in the other, the picture is dominated by lights and shadows, not exactly determinate, yet without stress on the boundaries (1929: 19).
The plasticity of our reading of Hegel, though, in response to Rosen's request, should be informed "an elucidation of the concept or the concepts involved" as well as "the point of the concept" (1982: 3).
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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