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Re-reading Hegel:
Meaning and Subjectivity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit

WILLIAM J. URBAN

Unveiling Deep Meaning & Subjectivization: The Understanding

By the conclusion of Hegel’s key third chapter on the understanding, consciousness will have realized how it is ultimately responsible for itself and its experience of reality. This is so much the case that it is not an exaggeration to say that the Phenomenology could end at this point. The chapter begins with the result of the previous chapter on perception whereby, having already seen how ‘my “meaning” has vanished’ through the dialectic of the first chapter, consciousness formally arrives at the Thing-in-itself or the ‘unconditioned absolute universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding.’ (§129) Consciousness qua understanding endeavors to see through what it now considers mere illusion to attain the underlying Thing-in-itself or, what are topological equivalents, essence or the supersensible. In hermeneutical terms, consciousness recognizes how its previous sense-certainty was only contingently held as personally meaningful, lacking any necessary claim to truth. It now preoccupies itself with the ‘difference between phenomenon and essence, between apparent meaning and hidden meaning.’ (Hyppolite 137) However, Hegel at once frustrates consciousness’ subsequent striving to attain the hidden or deep meaning that it assures itself is an object occupying the supersensible world, a world which has now opened up above and beyond the sensuous world of appearance. (§144) For he tells us that this true world is void precisely because it ‘is determined as the beyond of consciousness’ and moreover,

‘in order that there may yet be something in the void – which, though it first came about as devoid of objective Things must, however, as empty in itself, be taken as also void of all spiritual relationships and distinctions of consciousness qua consciousness – in order, then, that in this complete void, which is even called the holy of holies, there may yet be something, we must fill it up with reveries, appearances, produced by consciousness itself. It would have to be content with being treated so badly for it would not deserve anything better, since even reveries are better than its own emptiness.’(§146)

We see at once how this object which consciousness pursues is not, in its original dimension, an object at all but rather a place, and an empty one at that: it is only in a subsequent move that this emptiness is filled out with some content taken from the very sensuous world the supersensible ostensibly negated. So the ‘respective contents of the supersensible and of the sensuous world are the same; an object becomes “holy” simply by changing places – by occupying, filling out, the empty place of the Holy.’ (Žižek 1989: 194) But to avoid any misunderstanding, simply because the positive content we encounter in the supersensible beyond is the same as in our everyday world, this does not mean that there is no difference between the two realms. Rather, the beyond is to be conceived as ‘a kind of screen on to which one can project any positive content whatsoever – and this empty place “is” the subject. Once we become aware of this, we pass from Substance to Subject, that is, from consciousness to self-consciousness.’ (Žižek 1996: 160) This ‘passing from substance to subject’ will be discussed in more detail in our final section. For now, we should note how the place logically precedes the supersensible Holy object which occupies it. What Hegel specifies here is the logic of the sublime object, an object which does not in any way mask a deeper, more truthful or substantial meaning but simply masks the void it is filling out.12 And since the subject ‘is’ this empty place, when the object is realized as nothing but a ‘positivization’ of the void, the subject at once fully encounters himself. We will address how Hegel articulates the subject with respect to its ‘impossible’ objectal counterpart in our next section.13

As noted above, since Kant often yields to the temptation of conceiving the I of pure apperception as an isolated, unconditioned Thing-in-itself existing independently of the phenomenal I of self-experience, we could say that Kant gets stuck on the threshold of the unknowable supersensible and thus remains well within the logic of abstract understanding much of the time. But Hegel’s analysis reveals that the essence supposedly lurking behind the appearance is actually derivative of how consciousness epistemologically treats phenomena as if they are mere appearances. In fact, the very notion of appearance implies a veiled presence behind or beyond the accessible phenomenon. Yet if Hegel has exposed the truth of what supposedly lurks beyond the appearance as an empty place that ‘is’ the subject itself, this also means that it is not the case that the subject first perceives the object and only then subsequently perceives that he has done so (which retroactively makes his first perception an appearance for him). With Hegel this commonsense temporal sequence is reversed, for the logic of appearance suggests how apperception must have logical priority over perception so that the subject actually emerges by self-reflexively apperceiving itself as perceiving, which subsequently transforms phenomena into facades concealing greater ontological depth. This is how ‘reality itself turns into appearance. In other words, things do not simply appear, they appear to appear... once things (start to) appear, they not only appear as what they are not, creating an illusion; they can also appear to just appear, concealing the fact that they are what they appear to be.’ (Žižek 2006a: 29–30) In one of the most significant passages of his entire text, Hegel tells us the same thing:

‘The inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, come into being it comes from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling. The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance.’ (§147)

If the most elementary metaphysical gesture can be defined as an active will to disavow how things actually stand and instead to engage in a search for the true reality beyond it, Hegel’s final sentence above brings that search to the point of self-reference. That is, the supersensible essence beyond appearance is precisely something which appears, it is the appearance that there is a truer reality beyond the phenomenal sensible world, which means that essence ‘not only appears WITHIN appearances, but it is also NOTHING BUT its own appearance – it is just a certain GRIMACE of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within the identity.’ (Žižek 2001b: 80) Hence, the supersensible is effective only as redoubled, self-reflected or self-related appearance, coming ‘to exist only in the guise of an appearance of another dimension that interrupts the standard, normal order of phenomena.’ (Žižek 2006b: 192)

The illusion of those under the spell of abstract understanding ‘is precisely that “essence” is a positive entity beyond the negative movement of the appearance’s self-sublation,’ when in fact essence is the inherent power of negativity which makes appearance something not fully actual but a ‘mere appearance’ condemned to perish in the movement of self-sublation. (Žižek 2002: 214)14 So if Kant was cautious not to be taken-in by the illusory status of reality when there is something yet more real to be had in the noumenal realm beyond, Hegel’s tautological move exposes the illusory status of this illusion itself. In a reversal of the Kantian matrix, Hegel’s lesson is how limitation must be conceived of as prior to what supposedly lies beyond it. Certainly Kant also considers the subject as limited, condemned as he is to the phenomenal world and thus unable to comprehend the whole of reality it encounters due to the inaccessible Thing-in-itself. But this Thing-in-itself remains too reified with Kant and he thus overlooks how, if we are ever to ‘endure our encounter with reality, some part of it has to be “derealised,” experienced as a spectral apparition.’ (Žižek 2001a: 68) What Hegel claims by stating that the supersensible is the appearance qua appearance ‘is precisely that the Thing-in-itself is the limitation of the phenomena as such. “Suprasensible objects (objects of suprasensible intuition)” belong to the chimerical “topsy-turvy world” – they are nothing but an inverted presentation, projection, of the very content of sensible intuition in the form of another nonsensible intuition... [which are] ordinary objects of intuition, minus their sensible character.’ (Žižek 1992a: 36) In the end, the supersensible is nothing but the inherent limitation of intuited phenomena.

Now, if the supersensible object is read as a substantial Thing-in-itself pursued by the hermeneutical phenomenologist who abstractly understands the text as a mere appearance hiding deep meaning, Hegel frustrates such an enunciated position by showing how the very constitution of meaning itself hinges on a contingent bit of self-relating nonsense that the supersensible object ultimately reveals itself to be. Together with his discussion of the topsy-turvy inverted world (§157–60), Hegel in effect shows how ‘spiritual “depth” is generated by the monstrous distortion of the surface,’ thereby de-limiting a ‘nauseating “little piece of the real”... [as] productive of the spiritual dimension.’ (Žižek 1993: 50) Textually, it is only in a first move that consciousness can muse how, in accordance with the Christian notion of the heavenly beyond of earthly life, goodness will be rewarded in the former while criminality and injustice reign in the latter; for in a second move, we see how ‘the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity.’ (§160) Here Hegel ‘points out how inversion is always double – how, on a closer look, it becomes manifest that the “first” world whose inverted image is the topsy-turvy world is already in itself inverted.’ (Žižek 2002: 10–1)15

But how exactly does this happen? To answer this, we need to consider how earthly life appears as a vain and lowly existence only when the subject identifies with an ideal point which figures nowhere within the mirror-relationship between reality and its inverted image, a virtual point from which he gazes upon his own life and views it as a vain and lowly existence in contrast to the divine realm. As this matrix makes clear, the subject’s activity is self-reflexive and thoroughly tautological, a fact Hegel acknowledges when he tells us that the ‘reason why “explaining” affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciousness is, so to speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else, it is in fact occupied only with itself.’ (§163) Such tautological activity also speaks to the subject’s radical self-limitation, which in our terms means he is forever unable to take full account of the effect of his own act of interpretation. In such circumstances, the subject can only offer up explanatory narratives to cope with this fact, stories told to self and other which effectively fill-in the empty place of its subjectivity with a modicum of self-satisfying and substantial meaning. Here we have the shift from the subject qua void to its subjectivization. And what Hegel’s method of dramatizing the figure of consciousness qua understanding provides for us is a way to frustrate the secondary, derivative moment of subjectivization: to undermine the theoretical position taken by the hermeneutical phenomenologist, it is enough to stage it as an existential subjective concern for deep meaning and thereby show how the very place from which that position is defended (i.e., the conditions of that position) is overlooked by the subject who holds to it.16

The final paragraph of this chapter clears up a misunderstanding that may result from the foregoing formulations which seem to immediately identify the subject with the essence supposedly hidden behind the phenomenal veil. Such an immediate identification would imply that when consciousness passes to self-consciousness, the subject finally recognizes how the force which animates phenomena is not a transcendent essence behind phenomena standing opposed to the subject, but rather was the subject’s negating activity all along. In contrast, when Hegel unmasks the illusion of the beyond of phenomenal appearance, it is not simply to show us that there is nothing to see since there is nothing hidden; rather, what is hidden there is ‘[p]recisely the fact that there is nothing to hide. What is concealed is that the very act of concealing conceals nothing.’ (Žižek 1989: 193) But further, we find that behind the curtain of the phenomena, consciousness only finds what it itself has put there:

‘It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something there which can be seen. But at the same time it is evident that we cannot without more ado go straightway behind appearance. For this knowledge of what is the truth of appearance as ordinarily conceived, and of its inner being, is itself only a result of a complex movement whereby the modes of consciousness “meaning,” perceiving, and the Understanding, vanish.’ (§165)

This passage also tells us not only that there is no immediate identity between the subject and the (hidden) object but that the subject cannot even ‘go straightway’ to it. Rather, there is a minimal gap between consciousness and self-consciousness which is internal to the latter: modes of consciousness concerning the appropriation of meaning will necessarily fail because there is nothing behind the curtain, nothing which ‘is’ the subject. On the one hand, the unattainable object is unknowable only when consciousness substantivizes it and assumes that it ontologically precedes the place it occupies. But on the other, it is equally crucial to see how this (epistemological) failure of consciousness carries with it a certain constitutive ‘material force’ for the (ontological) success of self-consciousness, for the phenomenal passage from consciousness to self-consciousness implies experiencing this radical failure, of conceiving the beyond as the void of the impossibility of its own representation. In this sense, we could say that self-consciousness sees this nothing as such, thereby ‘grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject,’ as Hegel famously writes in his Preface. (§17)

But again, this nothing is not simply nothing, for if the subject is to emerge at all, he must oppose himself against what was referred to above as the sublime object, the object which remains an absolute non-subject that cannot be subjectivized and whose very presence involves the erasure of the subject. This is what the quasi-Hegelian celebration of the negative ontology of the subject qua negativity or qua nothing fails to see:17 most concisely said, ‘the void of subjectivity is strictly correlative to the emergence... of a stain which “is” the subject.’18 (Žižek 1994: 33) This stain is the very presence of meaning as such.19 And this presence is what the self-referential signifier we spoke above alludes to, acting as the objectal correlate to the empty promise of a meaning-to-come in which the subject, in an anticipatory gesture towards being, establishes an identity. We could say that the subject emerges as pure difference in relation to his own being and only then settles on a strategy of subjectivization, of striving to appropriate that being by way of meaning constituted under the sign of abstract understanding and its attendant concern for the deep meaning of that being presupposed to exist beyond self-sublating appearance.20 In the end, if we insist as Hegel does on the equivalence between the beyond of phenomena and the act of going beyond phenomena, we must also insist on the minimal gap between the two and likewise between being/truth and meaning.21 This minimal gap ‘is’ the subject.

We usually bemoan the fate of immediate life experience, lost at the hands of the abstract categories of language and the understanding. Consequently, we are tempted to read the Phenomenology as equally concerned with this loss and whose dialectic supposedly endeavors to overcome the gap between the richness of the object and Logos. However, this is not the case. As the foregoing analysis makes clear, the hermeneutical phenomenologist’s belief in an original fullness of life supposedly existing in some beyond eluding the network of symbolic determinations is illusory. Moreover, this logic must equally apply to the way the understanding is ultimately to regard itself, that is, how there is nothing beyond or previous to its own activity. In a sense there is only the process of understanding to be reckoned with, a process by which – in contemporary terms – the word violently tears the thing out of the concrete context from which it is embedded, thereby reducing the organic whole of experience to dead symbolic classification. This process Hegel actually celebrates in the Preface, clearly expressing wonder for and heaping unqualified praise on ‘the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power’ for its activity of dissolving and dismembering every immediate relationship. (§32) So Hegel’s concern is definitely not ‘how to leap over the abyss which separates acts from words, but how to conceive this abyss itself... The only way to “overcome” the abyss that separates acts from words is to thematize the act which opens this abyss, i.e., to render visible the radical violence... which forms the hidden reverse of the calm contemplative distance from reality.’ (Žižek 1992b: 54) This act is the understanding itself and with Hegel there is thus no need to supplement understanding with the ‘higher capacity’ of, say, reason as that which stands above and beyond understanding. For reason is not something which, in a higher dialectic, re-establishes the lost organic unity and supposedly sees the living movement that engenders what the understanding only sees as rigid determinations. On the contrary, because there is nothing beyond understanding , in order to

‘pass to Reason, we do not “add” anything to Understanding; rather, we subtract something from it (the spectre of an Object persisting in its Beyond) – that is to say, we reduce it to its formal procedure: one “surpasses” Understanding the moment one becomes aware of how it is already Understanding itself which is the living movement of self mediation one was looking for in vain in its Beyond.’ (Žižek 2002: 158)

Reason is thus ‘simply Understanding minus what it is supposed to be lacking, what is supposed to elude its grasp – in short: what appears to it as its inaccessible Beyond... Reason marks the moment of reduction of all content of thought to the immanence of Understanding.’ (ibid 160) This means that it is not possible to directly grasp the ‘true meaning’ of the Phenomenology as we are never simply faced with a clear choice between understanding and reason: to reach reason implies working through the deception of understanding and its illusory supposition of reason qua transcendent agency guaranteeing consistency and meaning to our lives even while (and especially when) we experience a loss of immediacy. That is, only when we further experience how this loss ‘is actually a loss of a loss, a loss of something without proper ontological consistency’ do we pass to reason. (ibid 159) In more mature Hegelian terms, we reach ‘absolute reflection’ by experiencing how the object in its immediate, pre-reflective givenness ‘only comes to be through being left behind,’ as Hegel puts it in his Science of Logic. (quoted in ibid 167) For nothing precedes the movement of reflection since this movement itself produces the retroactive illusion of an object given in advance. Analogously, without the error of the understanding and its illusory supposition, its own object (reason) would not have been produced at the end. At another level, neither is the end of history towards which Hegel’s ‘teleology of reason’ proceeds given in advance. This involves the same necessary structural deception, consisting in the fact that for this movement to take place, we historical agents must overlook how our own search creates what we find in the end. When the dialectical process ends, the presupposition that ‘reason governs actuality’ loses ground and the illusory status of a transcendent rational agency directing historical movement is exposed. We discover how we ourselves were producing the very meaning assumed to be hidden beneath our experiences of the contingent vicissitudes of history we mistakenly took as epiphenomenal manifestations of an underlying rational necessity, thereby reaching what Hegel calls Absolute Knowing. (ibid 171) It is this reason why it is sometimes said that the Phenomenology could conclude with the third chapter on the understanding, for self-consciousness is shown to be in full possession of its own immanent measuring standards and to have taken ultimate responsibility for itself and its experience of reality. We now turn to briefly examine a few other figures of consciousness before concluding.

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