The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida by Gaston Sean

Author:Gaston, Sean [Gaston, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2013-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

World, Fiction and Earth

1. Literature and the Impossibility of World

Having examined the concept of world in the history of philosophy from Kant to Derrida, in this final chapter I would like to turn to other related problems that we have touched on in previous chapters: the question of the fiction of world, the relation between the concepts of world and earth and the possibility of a philosophy without world. Initially, I will focus on a number of influential twentieth-century readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to explore how philosophy invents its own worlds and how the tradition of the philosophical concept of world can be challenged by rethinking the fictional worlds of literature. I will then turn to some recent critical ecological or earth-oriented readings of Derrida’s work to examine how the possibilities of the concept of world are limited by a valorisation of the earth as its ideal and absolute other. Finally, I will conclude by briefly addressing the impasses in advocating a philosophy without world. In the history of philosophy since Kant, there has always been the possibility that there is no world, but an emphatic declaration of its end only reflects the desire to escape philosophy itself.

Kojève, Hyppolite and Blanchot

As we have seen, like Kant before him, Hegel was unable to start the Phenomenology with a concept of world. In the first sections of the Phenomenology, there is the sense, perception and understanding of things, but there is no explicit discussion of world itself. Kant himself only turns to the world itself in the Critique of Pure Reason in the Transcendental Dialectic when world is no longer a possible object of experience and becomes a problem of the systematic unity of the ideas of reason. In the Phenomenology, Hegel marks the emergence of the supersensible world and its antagonistic relation to actuality in his account of self-consciousness and reason, but it is only when consciousness rises to the stage of spirit that one can speak of the actual world as the world of spirit. It is then that we understand retrospectively that it is these spiritual worlds that have given the discrete shapes, domains and spheres of each developing stage of the Phenomenology. It is only when we come to spirit that we realize that we were never without world.

One could argue that in their influential readings of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite both produce their own fictional worlds by attempting to read this absent world into the earlier sections of the Phenomenology. This creation of a fictional world in the midst of Hegel’s text is compounded by their interest in Hegel’s apparent discussion of literary writers and literature in general in the final stages of consciousness’s journey through reason. Kojève and Hyppolite’s works on Hegel appeared in 1946–1947 and are both cited by Maurice Blanchot in his ostensible review of their books, “Literature and the Right to Death” (1947–1948). This forty-page article not only raises the question of the relation between Hegelian philosophy, the

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