In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C  6 Mediating Play: Analyzing Jennifer Bates’s “Interplay” with Hegel, Shakespeare, and Morality Stephanie Zubcic Diverse voci fanno dolci note (Diverse voices make sweet harmony) —Dante, Paradiso, 6.124 This paper concerns an important and prominent theme in Hegelian study: the power of mediation to unite diverse voices in dark times. I begin with my interpretation of Hegel’s phenomenological subjectivity of “self-consciousness.” According to my reading of his Phenomenology of Spirit, his dialogical project gives significant emphasis to the idea that mediation acts as a dialogical process of representational “interplay.” I briefly discuss the historical and conceptual origin of this idea as it pertains to Hegelian thought. The central aim of this paper is to account for the role of imagination epistemologically as it relates to moral action. Exploring the contemporary work of the Canadian scholar JenniferAnn Bates, which mediates between Hegelian epistemology and Shakespearean drama, I try to elucidate her claim to show how the dialogical interplay between philosophy and literature can yield key insights into the marriage between epistemology and moral action. Specifically, my primary interest concerns the epistemic role of imagination in the development of moral self-consciousness. Bates’s illumination of the role of mediated representation in her first book, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (2004), has since been transformed, inspiring her forthcoming work Cues: Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Action, so as to suggest ways in which Shakespearean drama can mediate—that is, “re-present”—Hegelian shapes of “self-consciousness.” Building on her earlier analysis in Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, which examines the role of the imagination in informing and re-presenting self-consciousness, in Cues Bates shows how the characters of Shakespearean drama represent differing stages of Hegelian subjectivity to insightfully emphasize the intimate “interplay” between epistemology/knowledge and moral action. Offering a dialogical interplay between Hegelian self-consciousness (philosophy) and Shakespeare’s dramatic characters (literature), Bates explores the interaction between thought and action. In the third section of this paper I examine what exactly this connection between knowledge and morality might be. My analysis concludes with some ethical considerations as to whether there are moral limits or problems with construing mediation as interplay. 70 P    A Hegel’s Advancement of Phenomenological Subjectivity as Mediation Let us begin with a brief overview of Hegel’s response to the Enlightenment tradition of “intuitionism” by the way of developing his account of phenomenal subjectivity. To what extent is subjectivity dependent on intuitive faith? In the Preface to the Phenomenology Hegel proposes a challenge to his Enlightenment predecessors, and his answer to the aforementioned question, one might say, makes up that work. Critical of the (then) popular view that subjectivity rests on faith in intuitionism, a view held most notably by Jacobi, Novalis, and Schlegel,1 Hegel’s account of the subjectivity of self-consciousness makes use of an altogether different method, which takes its grounding in phenomenological description. In this respect, Hegel’s critique of epistemic “intuitionism” inspired his account of “self-consciousness.” As Werner Marx points out, Hegel’s opposition to intuitionism directly challenges Kant in particular and, more specifically, the Kantian transcendental apperception of the categories.2 According to Kant, “The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object.”3 However, Kant’s marriage to the transcendental unity of apperception requires the presupposition of what the subject is: a priori pure subjectivity is; along Kantian lines, the pure “thing-in-itself.” By contrast, in the Phenomenology Hegel establishes the phenomenological conditions of subjectivity, positing the theory that “what selfconsciousness is” must therefore be subject to a process of mediation. Contrary to intuitionism, Hegel’s notion that subjectivity is mediated takes into account the role of the perceiving self-consciousness in knowing what immediately is, as it is experienced by the subject. One reason for this conceptual shi is that Hegel not only seems to have realized that a theory of “intuitionism” preserves transcendental, pure categories necessary for a priori truth, which may be methodologically questionable but also shows that this way of characterizing subjectivity ultimately concedes the point that “things-inthemselves ” cannot be known. Hegel disagrees. In “Absolute Knowing” he directly opposes Kant’s epistemic conclusion: Through this realization [of the beautiful soul], this objectless self-consciousness ceases to cling to the determinateness of the Notion as against its fulfillment; its self-consciousness gains the form...

Share