Re-reading Hegel:
Meaning and Subjectivity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Introduction
In the first sentence of his Introduction Hegel tells us of his concern with understanding cognition. This fact alone almost necessitates that he undertake the journey of consciousness that is the Phenomenology of Spirit by utilizing the subject-object schema. Apparently this initial division will be somehow ‘overcome’ by the final chapter, as the goal of this journey is the point ‘where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.’ (§80)1 However, as Hyppolite points out, this conflicts with Hegel’s explicit theoretical position often repeated in these opening pages which critiques any philosophy that is only an epistemology. So why is the actual practice of the Phenomenology in clear retreat from, say, Schelling’s own starting point of the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective in knowledge? Why does Hegel’s text mark a return of sorts to Kant and Fichte’s ‘subjectivism’ with its point of view of the consciousness which assumes the distinction between subject and object? (Hyppolite: 5–11) To come to better grips with this tension, but also with an eye toward formulating a proper Hegelian response to critiques of this textual strategy by twentieth century hermeneutical phenomenology,2 we need to at once enquire into Hegel’s rationale for employing the modern subject-object schema.
We can begin to discern a response by broadly considering Hegel’s radical break with, on the one hand, the metaphysical tradition which seeks to analyze the basic structure of a reality simply existing ‘out there’ and, on the other, with Kant’s transcendental turn which investigates the subjective conditions of possibility of objective reality. In Hegel’s speculative philosophy, while the split which separates the Kantian subject from the in-itself is fully acknowledged, this split is re-inscribed into reality as its kenotic self-emptying. (Žižek 2009b: 127) Such a radical re-conception allows Hegel to conceive his Phenomenology as ‘the presentation of a series of aborted attempts by the subject to define the Absolute and thus arrive at the longed-for synchronism of subject and object.’ (Žižek 2002: 99–100) This series will not, however, culminate in the subject’s triumphant appropriation of a stable body of knowledge. Since Absolute Knowing rather entails a kind of reflective inversion which confronts the subject with the vertiginous experience of how the path towards truth coincides with truth itself, it is crucial that Hegel utilize the overly cautious and ‘obsessional’ Kantian strategy of limiting the subject’s possible experience to the world of phenomena while excluding from it the Thing-in-itself, all in order to subvert this matrix with a final reflexive twist. That is, where Kant feared confusion between phenomena and the Thing-in-itself, Hegel will question ‘whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?’ (§74) and thus expose Kant’s own desire to elude an encounter with the truth that is already here. (Žižek 1989: 190–1) In contrast to Kant, speculative philosophy means that the difference between for-us and in-itself is itself ‘for us,’ which disallows Hegel from adopting a criterion for truth other than one that is absolutely immanent, as he repeatedly tells us in the Introduction.3 This minimal self-relating or self-reflexivity has important consequences for the actual testing method Hegel uses throughout his text, one that is repeated time and again as he undermines one shape or figure (Gestalt) of consciousness to the next.4 We will examine this method in a few of these figures.
Hyppolite notes that the Introduction literally introduces only the first triad of Consciousness-Selfconsciousness-Reason of the Phenomenology’s bipartite structure. (Hyppolite: 4) As our interest is to discern what Hegel’s text has to say of meaning and subjectivity, we also our limit discussion to this triad which provides the phenomenal series of the different modes whereby the finite, isolated subject can grasp its environment. But we do examine two historical figurations of the Absolute itself, the ‘heroism of flattery’ and Absolute Knowing, which are found in the second triad Spirit-Religion-Philosophy. While this text of the early Hegel may ‘not yet [be] “truly Hegelian” precisely in so far as it still conceives of its role as that of the “introduction” to the System proper,’ a text whose very structure still betrays a ‘fascination with the “mad dance” of reflexivity, of dialectical reversals... with its satisfied speculative self-deployment,’ this paper endeavors to read the Phenomenology as a thoroughly non-hermeneutical phenomenology which already employs Hegel’s radical notion of subjectivity. (Žižek 1999: 85)
Lacanian-themed puzzles
