Philosophical Temperaments by Peter Sloterdijk Creston Davis Thomas Dunlap

Author:Peter Sloterdijk, Creston Davis, Thomas Dunlap
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000, Philosophy/General, PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

HEGEL

One must be at the end of one’s rope to be able to speak the truth—this conviction is woven into all of Hegel’s work like a tear-resistant thread. With it, Hegel elevated the fundamental motif of Plato’s epistemology to monumental heights: realizing means remembering; comprehending means reconstructing. The thinker whose system has been described—not without good reason—as the consummation of occidental or Christian-Platonic metaphysics was by his very nature the metaphysician of perfection. After Hegel, thinking philosophically means bringing home the harvest of existence; but the only thing that makes it home is what can make itself at home in everything: the spirit. In Hegel, this spirit takes its time; it has and makes history: by way of skulls and step-by-step it enters into the final domesticity, its own self; the wine of truth is extracted from a late harvest. Hegel’s typical times are therefore fall and evening; his preferred figure of thought is the deduction; his innermost color is gray, so closely associated with the night. Under his gaze, all scenery becomes an evening landscape, every view must become a final tableau. Terminal knowledge appears at the advanced hour, when the concept disconnects itself from the experience in order to arrange itself in balance sheets for all eternity. Having lived means everything. A life lived to the end will have been a good one if the completed life is tantamount to the permeation of the spirit completing possession of itself. Such a striving for entry into fullness shows that Hegel’s spirit, too, for all the newly won openness to Becoming, is aimed at a time after the end of time.

If Becoming is a school, it must eventually lead to a graduation; if it is a process, it cannot lack the moment of judgment. In this sense, Hegel is the thinker of maturity; his phenomenology as well as his encyclopedia offer programs for a reason that must pass through a specific curriculum. Only in the name of maturity can the historical and the metaphysical meaning be reduced to a common denominator. If the spirit accedes to its diffusion through time, it does so only in order to mature through it for the end of time and the time beyond time. Our attachment to what is temporary shall pass, until everything has transmuted into ash and knowledge. In Hegel the secret of ancient philosophy is revealed: that thinking metaphysically has always meant thinking in consummations. Hegel had the courage to answer the question about the “when” of consummation with reference to himself; his response was: now. Through dialectic, grandiosity assumes method. Thanks to his system, Hegel believed that he had thought his way into the timeless heart of Time. The spirit that speaks through his work has found reason for the thesis: my time is ripe; the world process as a whole has gone on the record; today what I began back in the day when I rose in the East must be perfected. What was passion has become archive. All

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