Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture

Mediality in Hegel: From Work to Text in the Phenomenology of Spirit

73 Mediality in Hegel: From Work to Text in the Phenomenology of Spirit
Jochen Schulte-Sasse In the “Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism,” a two-page manuscript from 1796 that is in G. W. F. Hegel’s handwriting but whose authorship is uncertain, the author or authors call(s) for “a new mythology.” The manuscript stresses the crucial role that collective narratives—and institutionalized practices of reflecting on such narratives—play in the development of human culture. Myths as fables or legends embodying the convictions of a people require a “reading,” a legein by a people—which amounts to saying that a mythology is more important than a myth. Thus the author insists that this mythology must serve ideas; it must become a mythology of reason. Until we make ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they are of no interest to the people and, conversely, until mythology is reasonable , the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus, in the end, enlightened and unenlightened must shake hands, mythology must become philosophical, and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophers sensuous.1 Metaphorically speaking, collective narratives—and their communal scrutiny— become indispensable in honing the human mind. 74 Jochen Schulte-Sasse Whether or not Hegel authored the manuscript, he never abandoned the notion that texts—or more precisely, textual objectifications of the human spirit—are an indispensable medium for cultural development. The most obvious outcome of this understanding of human history is the series of readings he offers in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the works of philosophical predecessors. These serve him to represent the history of the human mind as a sequence of “formations of consciousness” or “formations of the world” that have as their remote purpose or goal “absolute knowing.” What is the status of this “absolute knowing”? I would argue that the projection or positing of such a goal amounts to no more than a problematic construction—a construction that is culturally and historically contingent. Absolute knowing is the necessary, yet never reachable end of a historical process in which humans try to comprehend everything there is to comprehend . Or, as Michael N. Forster put it, “in Hegel’s view, the Absolute’s essential accomplishment of self-knowledge is identical with the historical process of human subjects progressing toward that knowledge of the nature of the Absolute expressed in Hegelian Science.”2 Hegel’s projection of an inaccessible goal of human development is influenced by Hölderlin’s notion of being. For Friedrich Hölderlin, “being” is an existential being, a “feeling” of our existence that precedes judgments and therefore cannot be turned into a content of consciousness; it is simply a presupposition that we necessarily have to take for granted if we want to account for the unity of our self-consciousness not only before it divides itself, that is, separates itself into the duality of subject and object, I and Non-I, but also as it makes judgments. Hegel turns Hölderlin’s “being” from something that precedes judgments into something that structures them as a Finalidee, the “idea of an end.” Both Hegel and Hölderlin liked to argue that the homophony, in German, of judgment (Urteil) and arch- or primal separation (Ur-teilung) has philosophical bearing.3 As Hegel put it in the Berlin Encyclopedia: “The etymological meaning of judgment in our language is richer; it expresses (or reveals) the initial unity of the concept and the latter’s differentiation as original/initial separation, which is precisely what judgment is. . . .”4 Hegel, however, drew different conclusions from this proposition. In reflection, which finds its expression in judgment(s) (Urteile) that are the result of arch-separations (Ur-teilungen), a request or call for (achieving) unity survives. That is, before its arch-separation “being ” cannot be subjected to the thinking of an “I” as Non-I unless we turn it into a Finalidee. Like “absolute knowing,” the unity of our selfconsciousness , or identity, is for Hegel an ideal, a Finalidee that we only can approach in endless approximations. In other words: for Hegel, as for Hölderlin, we feel or experience a being or prereflexive unity of a self that we lose or leave behind in acts of judgment that are equivalent to an “arch- 75 Mediality in Hegel separation” of the prereflexive unity of ourself. Hegel, however, differs from...