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Hegel on What Cannot Be Said: an Interpretation of the Ineffable in the Phenomenology's ‘Sense-Certainty’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2021

Ariën Voogt Open the ORCID record for Ariën Voogt [Opens in a new window]
Ariën Voogt*
Affiliation:
Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands [email protected]
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Abstract

It is often claimed that Hegel's philosophy cannot accept that something would remain beyond the grasp of conceptual language, and that his thought therefore systematically represses the possibility that something cannot be said. By analysing Hegel's account of the ineffable in the ‘Sense-Certainty’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that Hegel does not repress, but firmly confronts the problem of what cannot be said. With the help of Giorgio Agamben's linguistic interpretation, it is shown that Hegel's conception of the ineffable must be understood from the perspective of his dialectical understanding of language. What appears to be ineffable is only the constitutive result of the dialectical negation that conceptual discourse enacts. Consequently, the ineffable in Hegel's thought cannot be said to remain external to and independent from conceptual language.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , August 2022 , pp. 220 - 241
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Hegel Society of Great Britain

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