On Hegel
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
The Break that the French Revolution posed, and continuation of French Revolution throughout Europe. Emblematic moment, defeat of conservative Prussian monarchy by Napoleon, who rode through Jena the day after Hegel finished the Phenomenology.
This is a book that could only be written now at this historical moment. Hegel’s aim, this particular kind of philosophy could only be done at this particular historical conjuncture. It is only from the contingent historical moment that one could reach for Absolute Knowledge.
It’s only missing the mark which creates the mark as such.
The path to truth is truth itself.
Hegel 1807
The whole thing is on the path. What you reach in the end is a vector which points backwards, all these failures, is the path to truth. You don’t learn anything knew with Absolute Knowledge, you only learn the Absolute Knowledge was the journey.
Substance is Subject
European University at St. Petersburg December 4 2018
Hegel famously maintained that no philosophy can be summed up in a single proposition or a first principle. As he said in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Any so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle.” Its truth can only lie in its development, its deployment, ultimately in a system, not in the assessment of some foundational proposition. Still, once in his career he nevertheless sinned against this view and proposed such a foundational proposition of his own philosophy: “In my view, which must be justified by the exposition of the system itself, everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the truth not merely as substance but also equally as subject.” Or briefly: ‘Substance is subject’.
The lecture will try to explore the value and the impact of this seemingly very simple sentence. Why would Hegel choose this particular proposition on which to pin the fate of his philosophy and on which everything depends? One will have to consider the way in which the notion of substance, the key concept of philosophy since its inception, has been traditionally understood and Hegel’s proposal of the radical criticism of the traditional notion of substance. One will have to investigate the particular new way in which Hegel conceived the notion of subject, going against the grain of what is usually understood by subjectivity (and also against the grain of the current discussion of ‘correlationism’). Finally, the lecture will consider the big philosophical divide between idealism and materialism, the central battleground of philosophy, and how Hegel’s recasting of substance changes the very parameters of this divide.
The lecture will proceed by an immanent reading of Hegel, focused on the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, but it will also touch upon some contemporary debates (object oriented ontology, speculative realism etc.)
Substance is Subject
Phenomenology of Spirit is a book that tries to bring together all possible philosophical positions. Truth itself has a historical development.
11:00 What is substance? Underlying, lies under the surface, get to some dimension under the surface. Isolate something that endures through time, unchanging. Isolate something that is necessarily there not just contingent. Essential, essence as opposed to appearance. Stands for the universal, universally valid, not particular. Aims at unity as opposed to multiplicity, tries to grasp multiplicity by bringing it to one elementary principle. Hen kai pan: One and all.
Hegelian wants to work against all of the above. This is not substance according to Hegel. But he doesn’t abandon the word ‘substance’ ‘universality’ essence and ‘one’. He uses the same words, but these words work against the very logic that articulated them in first place.
What could be substance? idea, matter, spirit, matter, being qua being? Is the substance matter or the Idea/Spirit? For Hegel matter is much an idea as matter, its not an existing thing, its a concept, a universal, an incorporeal yet objective being, a non-sensuous yet sensuous being. Matter is a pure abstraction.
Who has ever seen matter. What we see are different colours, shapes, sizes. Its a thing of thought, an abstract idea, it would take a great abstraction to reduce diversity to matter. Matter is a pure essence of thought. Thought is matter, matter is thought.
We have to undo the mode of substantiality itself. Hegel’s major concept Self-Othering. Self can only become itself if it becomes other than itself. It has to take the risk of passing into the other, it can’t be itself unless it take this risk of passing into the other. The origin is empty in-itself unless it produces and negates the origin, in order to be anything at all it has to adopt the otherness.
It doesn’t do it because it’s externally pushed, its out of its own nature, nature that can’t reconcile itself. The idea of the Fall. Take the fall in the biblical sense. Fall from paradise. Hegel’s idea, is that we start with the fall, and paradise that existed before is a retroactive construction. Things have to fall to be themselves. It’s only after the fall that we can construct what they were supposed to be in themselves. Origin for Hegel is always EMPTY. Only when we fall from this alleged paradise of self-identity, only then can we retroactively see what preceded this.
Subject is impossibility of substance of being itself: necessary, one, universal. There’s always a break a torsion, and the name of this torsion of substance is SUBJECT. Doesn’t mean subject is somewhere else, we could isolate it, Hegel’s position, there is something with the very idea of substance that pushes it outside itself.
It’s not a subject that would be standing against an objective world out there. SUBJECT is already inscribed in this objective world.
Hegel’s subject is not a correlationist in Meillasoux’s sense. Subject is inscribed into the substance.
Everything that is universal must mediated through the particular and singular.
One splits into Two. There is no one, that wouldn’t be already an agent of split. Hegel abandons the traditional idea of substance. Only when it courageously adopts its opposite can it be substance, passing into its other.
Telos and Totality, self-enclosed totality, teleology towards a final end. But Hegel’s vision of Substance would go against these popular Hegelian supposed themes. There is no bigger sin in post-Hegelian philosophy to be subscribed to these T-T sins.
There never was such an era of T-T. Look at the people supposed representatives of this era. There never was such an era that could be described by the Heidegarians.
We didn’t get out of it. There never was such an era, nevertheless we never got out of it.
Metaphysics from Plato to Hegel, and now we have post-metaphysical thought. This universalizes things that shouldn’t be universalized. Hegel helps us think against the metaphysical assumptions.
Openness is the modern way of closure. What did the man from the country manage to do in the end. He closed the gates. Openness itself is our modern way of enclosure. This is Agamben speaking on The Law by Kafka. The problem is not how to open something that is closed, but to open openness itself. We must somehow dismantle this opposition.
56 minutes: The best way to dismantle X is X itself. The best way to dismantle identity is identity itself. Identity presupposes a split between 2 As. Identity implies an A becomes other to itself, and the second A is different from A. The very form of identity is enough to disrupt identity.
Oedipus Revisited
If this is indeed a reduction to family, its the most dysfunctional family. Oedipus a true nomad. Sophocles first wrote Antigone. Courageous defiance of rule, she knows exactly what she wants, commits her act and bears consequences. King Oedipus. His tragic realiztion. Oedipus at Colonus, 25 years later, written in the year of Sohpocles death.
Why doesn’t anybody know well Oedipus at Colonus? Lacan insisted on two things: Oedipus had no doubt many complexes but not the complex to which he gave the name. Oediupus did not have the Oedipus complex. There is a BEYOND the Oedipus. What is beyond Oedipus. Answer: Oedipus at Colonus. To reach beyond Oedipus we must read Oedipus at Colonus.
Offers his lacerated body as the cornerstone of a new social order. A lever to transform the social and political order. Unique trait of Oedipus refusal to subjectivize his guilt. Nobody can hold me accountable, Gods set me up. There was no complicity on his part, he didn’t know and didn’t decide, coincidence I killed my father, and coincidence I married my mother.
I did a crime but I can’t even by guilty for it. Oedipus at Colonus is the Death Drive. Oedipus embodies this Life beyond Life. The best thing is not to have been born.