The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard

4. Hegel’s Seductions

4. Hegel’s Seductions Hegel’s narrative is designed to seduce the reader. judith butler, Subjects of Desire whether we think of Kierkegaard’s authorship as seductive in the sense of eroticizing the reader so as to devour her or as an emancipation of the reader into autonomy—the two readings we considered at the close of Chapter 3—there can be no doubt that his authorship undertakes an aesthetically and ethically sophisticated project of seduction. Hegel, though, is alternatively portrayed by Kierkegaard as the most boorish and superficial sort of seducer and as the least seductive author of all. We noted in Chapter 2, in the context of Kierkegaard’s depiction of Hegel’s ‘‘system’’ as a form of extraterrestrialism—an ‘‘emancipation from telluric conditions’’ through its abstraction away from the concrete conditions of life—that Kierkegaard acknowledges the irresistibly seductive character of Hegel’s philosophy in an age that longs for anything that might make the burden of existence easier. By promising an objective knowledge of existence, ‘‘the system’’ provides a detour around the fear and trembling that attends the uncertainty of subjectivity. ‘‘The formulas for pain and suffering are recited by rote,’’ reduced to categories of logic and thus disarmed of their power (CUP 229). Difficulty If Hegel’s only seductiveness is his luring of the reader into a disburdening of her responsibility to confront the ‘‘objective uncertainty’’ 85 86 ‡ hegel’s seductions of existence (CUP 182)—since he supplies an objective explanation of everything, even our suffering and pain—Kierkegaard defines his own project of seduction as one of making life once again difficult. Hence Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, seated on a bench in the Frederiksberg Garden, smoking his cigar and ruminating over his life, realizes that he is ‘‘going on to become an old man . . . without really [having] undertak[en] to do anything.’’ He recognizes that he does not have the talent of ‘‘the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, . . . and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of [objective] thought easier and easier.’’ So he takes another puff of his cigar and comes to the insight that ‘‘inasmuch as with my limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, I must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.’’ Thus Climacus resolves ‘‘to create difficulties everywhere’’ (CUP 166). Yet what are we to make of this portrait of Hegel as a seducer into the ever ‘‘easier and easier’’ in light of his own description of his philosophy as an entry into ‘‘the difficult’’? We saw in Chapter 1 that Hegel distinguishes his notion of ‘‘thinking philosophically’’ from ‘‘ordinary’’ thinking in terms of denying us ‘‘the use of [our] familiar ideas,’’ so that we ‘‘feel the ground where [we] once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath [us],’’ and we ‘‘cannot tell where in the world’’ we are. So far from seeking to make the reader feel at home in the comforting space of an objective knowledge that relieves us of all burdens, Hegel understands his philosophy as a radical challenge against the commonplace ‘‘hankering’’ (Sehnsucht) for comfort (EL §3), and as an invitation, for those who choose to accept it, into difficulty and the uncanny sense of not being at home. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, though, the difficulty Hegel’s philosophy poses for its readers is the inverse of the difficulty Johannes Climacus resolves to dedicate himself to on his bench in the Frederiksberg Garden. Climacus (and Climacus’s author, Kierkegaard ) will make life difficult by returning the individual subject to the discomfort and anxiety of existence, whereas Hegel magically hegel’s seductions ‡ 87 produces difficulty by abstracting away from existence into the fantastic world of his logical categories. The Hegelian ‘‘difficulty’’ is simply the absurdity of his System with its abstruse logicizing of life. And in this sense, although in principle his philosophy is seductive—albeit in a superficial way, as a sinecure for those searching for an easier life—in its actual execution it is a hilariously obscure abracadabra of logical symbolization, the least seductive of all possible texts. It is the...