Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005<\/p>\n
HEGEL<\/p>\n
Confronted by these arguments, which seem to go round in circles, Immanuel Kant, possibly the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, concluded that there must be a distinction between what we know and what exists. In Kant\u2019s view, we can know things only as they appear to us, within a framework of knowledge that we ourselves create. Beyond the appearances, there lies a realm of thingsin-themselves, which is forever inaccessible to our knowledge. In the next generation, however, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel refused to settle for this gloomy view of the limitations on human knowledge. With the boundless optimism of the early nineteenth century about what was possible, Hegel developed a system that would impose no limits on what we are able to know \u2013 on condition that the ultimate object of knowledge is consciousness itself. Hegel\u2019s starting point is what he calls \u2018sense-certainty\u2019, our awareness at the level of the senses of the sheer existence of things in the world. 22<\/p>\n
It is because he stopped at this point in the argument, Hegel insists, that Kant supposed the true being of things was unknowable. Hegel\u2019s next move is therefore crucial. He turns consciousness into its own object of knowledge. Enlightened, rational, universal consciousness is consciousness of the world as it is; the world is thus synonymous with consciousness of itself. In these circumstances there can be no failure of correspondence between consciousness and things-inthemselves. \u2018Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality. . . . The \u201cI\u201d which is an object for me is the sole object, is all reality and all that is present\u2019 (Hegel 1977: 140). When rational consciousness fully knows itself, becomes its own other, uniting self and other without abolishing their difference, reason reaches the level of what Hegel calls Geist. The German word has no exact equivalent in English, but is variously translated as \u2018mind\u2019 or \u2018spirit\u2019. \u2018Reason is Spirit\u2019, Hegel affirms, \u2018when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself\u2019 (1977: 263). 23<\/p>\n
Hegel\u2019s incorporation of the world into consciousness might alternatively be understood to erase the world as anything more than an idea, and so to abolish the real. And even if few philosophers would subscribe to Hegel\u2019s system now, its influence is perceptible in the widespread idealism that links a number of influential cultural theorists, Judith Butler and Stanley Fish among them. 24
\nAt the same time, the specificity of the individual self disappears too. In a move that goes way beyond Cartesian mind\u2013 body dualism, Hegel contains and erases personal consciousness within universal reason. Recognizing, like Descartes, that individual experience is prone to error, Hegel locates absolute knowledge in a universality that entails \u2018the externalization and vanishing of this particular \u201cI\u201d\u2019 (308). 26<\/p>\n
It is the property of language to generalize. In an attempt to be as particular, as singular, as possible, Hegel says, I name \u2018this bit of paper\u2019, but language cannot reach the sensuous \u2018this\u2019, and since \u2018each and every bit of paper is \u201cthis bit of paper\u201d . . . I have only uttered the universal all the time\u2019 (66).<\/p>\n
Knowledge, then, deals in universals. <\/strong>It negates the particularity of sensation in favour of universality. What do we know about salt? That it is white, tart, granular . . . and these are general properties that differ from each other, while one or other of them may be shared with sugar or sand. Such knowledge is no longer single, personal, private, but shared, Hegel would say, universally. Sadly, however, there is a price to pay for the community of enlightened minds that thus becomes available. Because language constrains what it is possible to say, we can no longer say what we mean. We set out to name the particular experience, but language insists on universalizing it.<\/strong> “And since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.” (Hegel 1977: 60) Language allows no access to the uniqueness of things. Instead, it “has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all.” (66) 27<\/p>\n But there is worse to come. Language<\/strong>, which places things beyond reach, but which, as if in compensation, enables consciousness to know itself and to communicate with others, has the further effect of placing the self in its uniqueness equally beyond reach<\/strong>. Individuality has only \u2018an imaginary existence\u2019 (298). This unique self in its real existence is subsumed by a universal self that enters into a new kind of reality<\/strong>. Paradoxically, it is language that permits the self to exist in its difference from others. But that very difference immediately disappears again in the generality that characterizes language<\/span> …<\/p>\n Aware of all the twentieth century taught us about the irreducibility of cultural difference, culturalism rejects Hegel\u2019s Enlightenment conviction that absolute knowledge is possible as universal truth. It retains, however, his historicism, as well as his idealism, with the effect of erasing the real.<\/strong> Whatever resides outside culture is held to have no bearing on us: unnameable, it has no effects<\/strong>. 29<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005 HEGEL Confronted by these arguments, which seem to go round in circles, Immanuel Kant, possibly the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, concluded that there must be a distinction between what we know and what exists. In Kant\u2019s view, we can know things only as … Continue reading “hegel language”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,119,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-language","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6588"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6592,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions\/6592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}