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According to Hegel, philosophical thought can engage in either reason or understanding. Understanding is essentially an activity of making distinctions and labeling. It is Hegel’s contentsmentality —experience as a skeleton with tickets stuck all over it. Reason is the process of speculation; it occurs through the formulation of speculative sentences in which subject and predicate are folded back on themselves. The aim of speculation is to penetrate the inner life of the object and to capture in thought the intrinsic movement of the object. Thus every object is in truth a subject. The life of a subject is caught up in the life of all things. The life of reason allows the mind’s eye to see into the inner illumination of the object. The understanding has no interest in the inner life of the object. The understanding is concerned with the object only to the extent that it can reflect its own powers off the object and thus know it. Descartes and Locke are the first philosophers of reflection . Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is the first to use “reflection” in the philosophical sense in English . Locke distinguishes two sources of our ideas. One is sensation , the means by which we experience objects. The other source of ideas is the experience our own mind has of its operations . This is internal sense; the other is external sense. Locke says: “But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION , the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations with in itself” (I: 123–24). In a letter to Antoine Arnauld, on July 29, 1648, Descartes writes: “We make a distinction between direct and reflective thoughts corresponding to the distinction we make between direct and reflective vision, one depending on the first impact of 25 C H A P T E R 3 Hegel’s Reason: A Digression the rays and the other on the second.” Descartes says the simple thoughts of infants are direct and not reflective, such as when they have feelings of pain or pleasure originating in the body. “But when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that he has not felt it before, I call this second perception reflection [hanc secundam perceptionem reflexionem appello], and attribute it to the intellect alone, in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other.” In this passage Descartes draws the analogy that is the basis of the modern conception of reflection. He compares the reflection of light in perception, the subject of optics, with reflection in the intellect, the subject of mental philosophy. The historical source for reflection in French is the Discourse (1637), where Descartes uses reflection in parts 4 and 5. I have given an account of the history of reflection and its connection to the development of the science of optics in Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge. The understanding, in its distinctive marking and labeling, ignores time except as Kant conceives it—as one of the forms of intuition. The understanding attempts to achieve necessity in its formation of experience by ignoring time as a feature of the real. Hegel’s reason, in contrast, is a way of realizing the nature of time as part of the inner life of the object become subject. To think dialectically is to bring reason into time, into the actual movement of experience. Dialectical thought takes the knower into the movement of experience and imitates it, in the sense of directly capturing this movement in language. To bring reason into time is always in some sense to make the process of reasoning a narrative process. Narrative is the natural form of temporal thinking. There is no narrative of the present or the future; the narrative always connects the past remembered to the present or the future. The art of the narrative is the art of the Muses who, as Hesiod says, could sing of what was, is, and is to come (Th. 36–39). The art of the Muses is the basis of reason, in Hegel’s sense. The original product of the Muses is not philosophy but the fable, the work of the poets. As Joyce says: “Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it” (Ulysses, I, 24). 26 Hegel’s Absolute [3.141.2.96] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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