The Hegel Variations: on the Phenomenology of Spirit

Frederic Jameson · 2017

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philosophyHegellibrary

ResponseJun 20, 2026

Idealism must be understood as a specific theoretical response to the peculiar problems of consciousness: indeed, materialism would in that case be understood first and foremost as a failure to pose those problems (and for Berkeley as well as Hegel, the philosophical defect of materialism lies in the incoherence of its concept of “matter” as such). Kant organized this problem in the most striking and productive way when he classified consciousness (the subject or the “soul”) as a noumenon and denied any possibility of knowing it in itself. Others have helpfully used physical analogies to reinforce the point: our minds, looking out of our eyes, cannot see themselves or grasp what lies behind them. To shift from these physical analogies to temporal ones, it becomes clearer that as we are always conscious- even in sleep or dreams, a kind of lower level of consciousness or what Leibniz might call sensitivity-we cannot by definition know what it is to lack that “attribute”: what Hegel’s contemporaries called the not-I is that which consciousness is conscious of as its other, and not any absence of consciousness itself, something inconceivable except as a kind of science-fictional picture-thinking, a kind of thought of otherness. But it is hard to understand how we could know something without knowing what its absence entails: and it may well be, as Colin McGinn argues, that consciousness is one of those philosophical problems which human beings are structurally unfit to solve; and that in that sense Kant’s was the right position to take: that, although its existence is as certain as the Cartesian cogito, consciousness must also remain perpetually unknowable as a thing-in-itself.p. 31-32

Compare this to Brutus’ line from Julius Caesar:

No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.Julius Caesar, I.2.58-59

The “eye sees not itself” has many layers of meaning. It is a simple fact that the eye gazes outward and cannot see itself in its own field of vision. Eyes are invisible, eyes don’t exist until they happen to pass over a reflective surface. The first eyes we see belong to someone else, to our mother hovering above us. The eyes, a window into another person’s subjectivity, belong to another before they ever belong to us. That first experience of subjectivity is not an experience of our own subjectivity.

In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Bottom is working out how he will perform the role of Pyramus. “What is Pyramus—a lover or a tyrant?” he asks. “If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes. I will move storms; I will condole in some measure. To the rest.—Yet my chief humor is for a tyrant.” (1.2.24-26)

But the eye sees not itself. The audience cannot look to their eyes any more than Brutus can look to his own.

On the other hand, we are shown how the world can be defined for us through the will and the wit of a playwright. The construction of reality is a collaboration between the playwright, the actors, and the audience itself.

We observe the action, and we are bound up in it. The stakes of the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are life and death for the mechanicals — they know that provoking Theseus or his guests could be fatal, and they are careful to use irony to prevent any misunderstandings. Quince points out that if they play the lion with excessive veracity, the audience (in this case the very real political authority of Athens) would “shriek, and that were enough to hang us all.” (1.2.74). Bottom agrees—“they would have no more discretion but to hang us” (1.2.78), but he is confident that they can modulate the performance. He invokes one of his constant inversions to “roar you as gently as any sucking dove”. Though the mechanicals joke about it, the penalty for art that transgresses could very well be death. Real power and simulated power intersect here. But we see that the power of the actor to move the tyrant to violence is in fact very real power.

This is a funny inversion of power. Bottom can move storms, like Prospero, but only in simulation. His tyranny is real enough to convince an audience for the duration of a performance, but obviously far, far from the real power of Theseus. What is the magic that occurs in the theater and what kind of power is it really?

The affinity in Bottom for the tyrant, his chief humor, is the classical affinity idea — bottom is tyrant and subject, we are all that way. His affinity is how he recognizes Theseus as a tyrant, knows to fear him. Because he himself is a tyrant too, a tyrant in his own life and scope.

Highlights · 13

Idealism must be understood as a specific theoretical response to the peculiar problems of consciousness: indeed, materialism would in that case be understood first and foremost as a failure to pose those problems (and for Berkeley as well as Hegel, the philosophical defect of materialism lies in the incoherence of its concept of “matter” as such). Kant organized this problem in the most striking and productive way when he classified consciousness (the subject or the “soul”) as a noumenon and denied any possibility of knowing it in itself. Others have helpfully used physical analogies to reinforce the point: our minds, looking out of our eyes, cannot see themselves or grasp what lies behind them. To shift from these physical analogies to temporal ones, it becomes clearer that as we are always conscious- even in sleep or dreams, a kind of lower level of consciousness or what Leibniz might call sensitivity-we cannot by definition know what it is to lack that “attribute”: what Hegel’s contemporaries called the not-I is that which consciousness is conscious of as its other, and not any absence of consciousness itself, something inconceivable except as a kind of science-fictional picture-thinking, a kind of thought of otherness. But it is hard to understand how we could know something without knowing what its absence entails: and it may well be, as Colin McGinn argues, that consciousness is one of those philosophical problems which human beings are structurally unfit to solve; and that in that sense Kant’s was the right position to take: that, although its existence is as certain as the Cartesian cogito, consciousness must also remain perpetually unknowable as a thing-in-itself.

p. 31-32Response ↑

We are in a mythic state of the world, that “blooming, buzzing confusion” as which William James identified the body’s awakening (or the world before philosophy); and it is this confusion that can loosely be characterized as immediacy, as a kind of deafening absence of negativities or distinctions. Not even individuality, the present, singularity, are words that can characterize this state, which precedes all the differentiations on which those concepts will later on be founded. Indeed, the only phenomenon which can in any way be structurally placed in relationship to this sensory plenitude turns out, in one of Hegel’s most striking and original moves, to be language itself.

p. 34-35

This is to say that, while language cannot be trusted to convey any adequate or positive account of the Notion, or of truth and reality-whence the tortured sentences and figures through which Hegel is forced to attempt such accounts-it can much more pertinently be used as an index of error or contradiction. **Language, in other words, is more revealing for what it cannot say than it is for what it does manage to say**: and this will clearly also mark the kinship of this moment of Hegel, not only with contemporary theory, but also with modernism in literature, where failure is so often more significant than success, and where the limits of language become the paradigm for the limits of representation as such.

p. 35

The passage at first seems to be a rehearsal, in the specific register or thematics of language itself, of that more general dialectic of externalization and internalization to which we have already briefly referred, but one which expresses itself through an opposition of form and content (unlike many of the other discussions of externalization as work or production). Here “counsel” begins as the content of this new secular post-sacred world of modernity as Bildung or culture: **the barons impart wisdom and good sense to the king, they lay out the situation for him and point out the consequences good and bad-in other words, their language has determinate content and is worth what the content is worth.** With the shift in gravity characteristic of the emergent absolute monarchy, little by little it becomes the form of language-the fact of speaking to the king, of having the right to speak to the king- which outweighs anything specific to be said to him. This shift is more than the mere status change of a language of equals into a language of courtiers, it is a foregrounding of language itself as such; nor is this a mere degradation of language’s function. **For what emerges in the increasing differentiation of language as a medium in its own right (and the function of that medium as message in the atmosphere of the court), is also paradoxically an emergence of individuality as such. The paradox is that my individuality, expressed through the first person of language, does not really come into existence until it exists “for others”: we here discover a linguistic version of the dialectic of recognition that was hitherto visible only in the one-on-one hand-to-hand combat of the future master and the future slave.**

p. 38

Delayed gratification is certainly a notion familiar to us at least since Weber’s Protestant Ethic, where, in the form of wages, it characterizes the cultural revolution specific to capitalism, the reorganization of the psyche required for the transformation of peasants into paid laborers. The new temporality Hegel has in mind here would seem rather to reflect the rhythms of handicraft production, insofar as the artisan is still able to recognize himself in the thing produced, in the matter thereby formed.

p. 58

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