The Hegel Variations: on the Phenomenology of Spirit

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.

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.

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.

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.