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The Safeguarded Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Amy Mullin
Amy Mullin
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Nietzsche writes about the common temptation to take the capacity for consciousness as constituting the “kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies it growth and intermittences. One takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’.” The very description of the nature of this unified organism is indicative of reasons one might wish to believe in it. It is “abiding” and “eternal.” Nothing in the world poses a threat to its existence or survival. This temptation and Hegel's complicated response to it are the subject of this essay. In particular I will investigate the accuracy of Adorno's claims that Hegel is untrue to his own insights into the dialectical nature of the self, and that Hegel's self-betrayal is due to the the fact that “like Kant and the entire philosophical tradition including Plato, Hegel is a partisan of unity.”

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995

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References

Notes

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, translated by Kaufman, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), §11, p. 85Google Scholar.

2 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, translated by Ashton, E. B. (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 158.Google Scholar See also: “Objectively, dialectics means to break up the compulsion to achieve identity, and to break it by means of the energy stored up in that compulsion and congealed in its objectifications. In Hegel, this meaning won a partial victory over Hegel—although Hegel, of course, could not admit the untruth in the compulsion to achieve identity” (ibid., p. 157).

3 Heidegger, Martin, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Emad, Parvis and May, Kenneth (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 135Google Scholar.

4 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 142Google Scholar.

5 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Smith, Norman Kemp (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), §A402Google Scholar.

6 Hegel, Georg W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§199–206, 232–39, 594–95Google Scholar.

7 Julia Kristeva points to this connection between the grammatical subject and transcendental ego in her essay “From One Identity to an Other” in Desire in Language, translated by Gora, Thomas, Jardine, Alice and Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 130Google Scholar.

8 Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, §A382Google Scholar.

9 The relation between the transcendental and empirical egos could alternatively be described as a connection between noumenal and phenomenal selves. The Critique of Practical Reason makes it clear that the noumenal acting ego is for Kant the same as the transcendental ego. I stick to the transcendental-empirical distinction instead of also referring to it as the noumenal-phenomenal distinction in the interest of clarity. See Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, Discussion of Transcendental Paralogism, esp. §§426–30Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., B574.

11 Ibid., B575.

12 Ewing, A. C., Kant's Treatment of Causality (London: Archon Books, 1969), p. 201Google Scholar.

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14 For poetic expression of this awareness see Emily Dickinson's poem 267 in Dickinson, Emily, Final Harvest (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1961), p. 165Google Scholar.

15 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, §85Google Scholar

16 Mead makes the same point, Writing, : “the unity and structure of the complete self reflects the unity and structure of the social process as a whole” (George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, edited by Morris, Charles W. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962], p. 144)Google Scholar.

17 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Hegel's Dialectic, translated by Smith, P. Christopher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 66Google Scholar.

18 Gadamer does say that “a further insight contradicting this one will come” (Ibid., p. 66).

19 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, §189Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., §199.

21 Ibid., §203.

22 Ibid., §206.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., §216.

25 Ibid., §213.

26 Ibid., §207.

27 Ibid., §232.

28 Ibid., §237.

29 Ibid., §238.

30 Ibid., §239.

31 Ibid., §312.

32 Ibid., §306.

33 Ibid., §336.

34 Ibid., §335.

35 Ibid., §346.

36 Maclntyre, , “Hegel on Faces and Skulls,” p. 237Google Scholar.

37 Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, translated by Riviere, Joan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), p. 30Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 49.

39 Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Sheridan, Alan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 301Google Scholar.

40 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, §652–53 (compare to §312, 508)Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., §356.

42 See, for example, Plotinus, , Ennead I, Sixth Tractate in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, edited by Hofstadter, A. and Kuhns, R. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964), p. 146Google Scholar ; Augustine, De Ordine, in Hofstadter, and Kuhns, , Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p. 182;Google ScholarPlato, , The Republic §443e, in The Collected Dia logues of Plato, edited by Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 686Google Scholar; and Phaedrus 256b, in Ibid., p. 501; Kierkegaard, Søren, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, translated by Steeve, Douglas V. (New York: Harper & Row, 1956);Google ScholarKierkegaard, Søren, Either / Or, Vol. II, translated by Lowrie, Walter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 328;Google ScholarHeidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 369. Interestingly enough, the latter passage comes in the context of a long discussion of Kant's failure to provide any true unity of the self with the ‘I think’ of transcendental apperceptionGoogle Scholar.

43 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, §802Google Scholar.

44 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 357;Google Scholar see also: “The world spirit is worshipped like a deity” (Ibid., p. 305).

45 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, §350Google Scholar.

46 Ibid., §352.

47 Ibid., §475.

48 Ibid., §461.

49 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 161Google Scholar.

50 Hegel, Georg W. F., “The Science of Logic,” Part 1 of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in Hegel's Logic, translated by Wallace, William (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), §34, p. 54Google Scholar.

51 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 157Google Scholar.