No More Learning

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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