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Rupture, Closure, and Dialectic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.
This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.
In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.
- Type
- Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 15 , Issue 1: number 29 , Spring/Summer 1994 , pp. 23 - 37
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1994
References
1 One could play on the term “rupture”, in its many compounded forms, for example interruption, abrupt, irruption, eruption, disruption, and corruption and their respective verbal forms. These terms appear in Hegel's text in many ways, both as literal translations and as terms connoting some form of rupture or break, for example brachen, reissen and their various compounds, and compound terms involving heraus, herein, hinaus, and hinein.
2 There is no justification in forcing Hegel to give up or to give priority to one of these theses for the sake of “consistency”. Contradiction and ambiguity in Hegel is not a sign of “inconsistency”, but usually a sign that one is perhaps near to some truth. Nonetheless, most interpretations of Hegel do this, and it is this, I think, which is at the heart of criticisms that Hegel has absorbed the particular or effaced difference. These criticisms, as they usually stand, are unsupportable in any justified way.
3 This maieutic dialectic is the dialectical method of the early Socratic dialogues of Plato and must be clearly distinguished from the method recommended to the young Socrates by Parmenides in The Parmenides, as well as the other versions of dialectic discussed in various contexts by Plato. That recommended by Parmenides was later developed by Aristotle and then in medieval philosophy, and was taken over by Kant. But no version of dialectic other than the maieutic will meet the conditions required by Hegel. For a discussion of this in the context of the Science of Logic, see my “Hegel's Science of Logic: Ironies of the Understanding” in DiGiovanni, George, ed. Essays on Hegel's Logic (State University of New York Press, 1990), pp 153-69Google Scholar. For a discussion of the general problem, see my Hegel's Quest for Certainty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
4 I have tried to work out some of these difficulties in my Hegel's Quest for Certainty.
5 Another classical problem in Hegel – that of the relation between system and method – is here also broached. If I am right about this problem of beginnings, then if the opposition between system and method is seen as the basis for a negative critique of Hegel, then the critique is misplaced. Among a host of other questions affected by the discussion of beginnings is the challenge to Hegel in the form of William Desmond's critique of self-mediation. Again, if I am right, then self-mediation does not end inevitably with the erasure of radical otherness. This issue will be taken up tangentially at the end of the present paper.
6 This ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit, Doppelsinnigkeit) reflects, internal to the system itself, the ruptured nature of beginnings, now not pointing backwards to the mediating beginning of the immediate beginning, but rather forwards to the system itself in its closure. Throughout his work unresolved ambiguity – but not ambivalence – are at the heart of the matter. The relation between this ambiguity and the general problem of beginnings is worth a separate essay. In my view it is also at the heart of Desmond's own authentic ambivalence about Hegel's dialectic in contrast to Desmond's own “metaxological” position.
7 When the Preface was written is of no concern here. The question is one of system, and it is the Preface that begins the mediated introduction to the introduction to the system.
8 Hegel writes that a beginning is only a beginning; however, “when this activity [proper to a Preface, namely that of stating aims and results and the relationship of a philosophical work to other philosophical works,] is taken for more than the mere beginnings of cognition, when it is allowed to pass for actual cognition, then it should be reckoned as no more than a device for evading the real issue… “ [emphases mine] (§3).
9 It should be noted also that, as in the Logic, Hegel begins the Phenomenology proper by addressing beginnings. “The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it.” (§90).
10 Compare the discussion in the Logic, in a passage on mediated and immediate beginnings in the system, cited above, p 24. There is, of course, another rupture, a rupture in the historical-philosophical dialogue to which Hegel belongs. This complicates the situation of rupture and closure, but in no way reverses anything I am going to claim about this rupture in natural consciousness. For a further discussion of the historical-philosophical dialogue in this respect, see my Hegel's Quest for Certainty.
11 It is this consciousness of alienation that comes into contradiction with the memory of traditional philosophical discussions. “Turning away from the empty husks, and confessing that it lies in wickedness, [natural consciousness] despises itself for so doing, and now demands from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as the recovery through its agency of that lost sense of solid and substantial being”. (§7)
12 See my Hegel's Quest for Certainty.
13 What can be said here, of course, is only anticipatory. So we remain true to the nature of a Preface of Introduction. (§57)
14 Thus, what is at work here is only what is at work with every question, regardless of what it is. If there is to be an answer to a specific question, the response must be to that specific question and to no other. Hegel does not begin by assuming the absolute standpoint; he begins by assuming the question of the absolute standpoint. See my discussion of this in Hegel's Quest for Certainty.
15 As I have argued elsewhere, the so-called “end of philosophy” claimed by Hegel is only a completion up to his own time in history. Hegel does not make any claims for any absolute end to history.