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  • Surprised by Geist: Hegel’s Dialectic as Fish’s Artifact
  • J. M. Fritzman

Reading is an activity, and . . . meaning, insofar as it can be specified, is coextensive with that activity, and not, as some would hold, its product.1

This article interprets the argumentative strategy of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right in light of the three sets of categories Stanley Fish articulates in his Self-Consuming Artifacts: rhetorical and dialectical presentations, self-satisfying and self-consuming artifacts, and self-satisfying and self-consuming epistemologies. Typically, a self-satisfying artifact is presented rhetorically and expresses a self-satisfying epistemology, as a self-consuming artifact is presented dialectically and expresses a self-consuming epistemology. Hegel’s argumentative strategy, however, is a dialectically presented self-consuming artifact that expresses a self-satisfying epistemology. This article has five sections. The first describes Fish’s categories. The second explains Hegel’s rejection of edifying philosophy. The third examines Hegel’s argumentative strategy in the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The fourth discusses Hegel’s imminent future. The final section suggests that the Sittlichkeit of modernity is, paradoxically, the recognition that Sittlichkeit is impossible.

Presentations, Artifacts, and Epistemologies

For the questions “what is this work about?” and “what does it say?,” I tend to substitute the question “what is happening?” and to answer it by tracing out the shape of the reading experience, that is by focusing on the mind in the act of making sense, rather than on the sense it finally (and often reductively) makes.2

Fish has three sets of categories, each set containing two elements: rhetorical and dialectical presentations, self-satisfying and self-consuming artifacts, and self-satisfying and self-consuming epistemologies. A rhetorical presentation is one that accords with “the categories and assumptions of received systems of [End Page 51] knowledge.”3 Put otherwise, a rhetorical presentation attempts to persuade by appeals to views and opinions already held by its audience. Readers of such a presentation are not asked to examine their beliefs, but instead those beliefs are supported and endorsed. As a consequence, a rhetorical presentation flatters, “for it tells the reader that what he has always thought about the world is true and that the ways of his thinking are sufficient.”4 This last point is crucial. A rhetorical presentation tries to persuade its readers that some specific view, perhaps one that is widely and firmly held by those readers, is false and so should be replaced by another one. While seeking to persuade that a particular belief be abandoned, however, a rhetorical presentation challenges neither its readers’ assemblage of beliefs nor the processes of reasoning by which those beliefs are linked and inferences are made. A dialectical presentation, by contrast, does precisely that. It is not so much concerned to overturn any particular belief, although it may seek that too, as it is to challenge its readers’ assemblage of beliefs and processes of reasoning. Where a rhetorical presentation comforts its readers, a dialectical presentation “is disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.”5

The difference between Fish’s rhetorical and dialectical presentations is not merely a matter of scope, where the former would seek to change one or a few beliefs of a reader, while the latter would aim to overthrow the entire set of beliefs. The difference between these two forms of presentation extends to their methods of suasion: “In general, the contrast holds, between a language that builds its readers’ confidence by building an argument they can follow, and a language that, by calling attention to the insufficiency of its own procedures, calls into question the sufficiency of the minds it unsettles.”6 A rhetorical presentation endeavors to alter but a few of its readers’ opinions, leaving intact their assemblage of beliefs and processes of reasoning, and so it can confidently appeal to their other ideas and intuitions, relying on exhortation or appeals to what passes as fact and common sense, as need be. As may already be obvious, a dialectical presentation cannot proceed in such straightforward manner. This is so because it strives to transform...

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