{"id":9490,"date":"2012-10-11T20:19:22","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T01:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9490"},"modified":"2012-10-11T20:28:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T01:28:19","slug":"totality-and-the-absolute-objective-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/11\/totality-and-the-absolute-objective-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"totality and the Absolute objective spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

No deduction will bring us from chaos to order; and to locate this moment of the magical turn, this unpredictable reversal of chaos into Order, is the true aim of dialectical analysis. For example, the aim of the analysis of the French Revolution is not to unearth the \u201chistorical necessity\u201d of the passage from 1789 to the Jacobin Terror and then to Thermidor and Empire, but rather to reconstruct this succession in terms of a series of (to use this anachronistic term) existential decisions made by agents who, caught up in a whirlwind of action, had to invent a way out of the deadlock<\/em> (in the same way that Lacan reconceptualizes the succession of oral, anal, and phallic stages as a series of dialectical reversals).<\/p>\n

… the Hegelian totality is not merely the totality of the actual content; it includes the immanent possibilities of the existing constellation.<\/span><\/p>\n

To \u201cgrasp a totality\u201d one should include its possibilities; to grasp the truth of what there is, one should include its failure, what might have happened but was missed.<\/span><\/p>\n

But why should this be the case? Because the Hegelian totality is an \u201cengaged\u201d totality, a totality disclosed to a partial partisan view, not a \u201cneutral\u201d overview transcending engaged positions\u2015as Georg Luk\u00e1cs recognized, such a totality is accessible only from a practical standpoint that considers the possibility of changing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a rule, Hegel\u2019s famous suggestion that one should conceive the Absolute not only as substance but also as subject conjures up the discredited notion of some kind of \u201cabsolute Subject,\u201d a mega-Subject creating the universe and keeping watch over our destiny. For Hegel, however, the subject, at its very core, also stands for finitude<\/strong>, the cut, the gap of negativity<\/span>, which is why God only becomes subject through Incarnation: he is not already in himself, prior to Incarnation, a mega-Subject ruling the universe. Kant and Hegel are usually contrasted along the lines of finite versus infinite: the Hegelian subject as the totalizing and infinite One which mediates all multiplicity; the Kantian subject marked by finitude and the gap that forever separates it from the Thing. But, at a more fundamental level, is not exactly the opposite the case?<\/p>\n

The basic function of the Kantian transcendental subject is to continuously enact the transcendental synthesis of apperception, to bring into One the multitude of sensible impressions; while the Hegelian subject<\/strong> is, in its most basic dimension, the agent of splitting, division, negativity, redoubling, the \u201cfall\u201d of Substance into finitude.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Consequently, it is crucial not to confuse Hegel\u2019s \u201cobjective spirit\u201d<\/span> with the Diltheyan notion of a life-form, a concrete historical world, as \u201cobjectivized spirit,\u201d the product of a people, its collective genius: the moment we do this, we miss the point of \u201cobjective spirit\u201d<\/span>, which is precisely that<\/p>\n

it is spirit in its objective form, experienced by individuals as an external imposition, a constraint even\u2015there is no collective or spiritual super-Subject that would be the author of \u201cobjective spirit,\u201d whose \u201cobjectivization\u201d this spirit would have been.<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, for Hegel there is no collective Subject, no Subject-Spirit beyond and above individual humans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therein resides the paradox of \u201cobjective spirit\u201d<\/span>: it is independent of individuals, encountered by them as given, pre-existent, as the presupposition of their activity; yet it is nonetheless spirit, that is, something that exists only insofar as individuals relate their activity to it, only as their<\/em> (pre)supposition.<\/span> 286<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No deduction will bring us from chaos to order; and to locate this moment of the magical turn, this unpredictable reversal of chaos into Order, is the true aim of dialectical analysis. For example, the aim of the analysis of the French Revolution is not to unearth the \u201chistorical necessity\u201d of the passage from 1789 … Continue reading “totality and the Absolute objective spirit”<\/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":[100,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9490","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=9490"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9496,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9490\/revisions\/9496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}