The Work of Difference by Wasser Audrey;

Author:Wasser, Audrey; [Wasser, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4803987
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Reflection

Ever since Descartes’s cogito me cogitare, in which the activity of thinking is reflected in a second act that grasps the first as its object, thinking has been characterized as a fundamentally reflexive and reflective operation. As such, it has served as the paradigm of subjectivity as well as the cornerstone of certainty on the basis of which knowledge of the world is made possible. With Johann Fichte’s rewriting of Kantian philosophy, the conjunction of reflection and subjectivity reached a kind of apex. Fichte aimed to found his theoretical project of Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowledge (published in 1794–95 but revised throughout the philosopher’s life), on the absolute first principle of the freely self-positing “I,” from which a philosophy of the natural world could subsequently be deduced. This “I” is constituted by an act of positing that immediately takes the form of a knowledge of itself as self-positing; as such Fichte identifies the “I” as an originary unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, subject and object, form and content, agent and product of its own action.

The early German romantics, and principally Friedrich Schlegel, responded to Fichte in a way that has had major consequences for the Western conception of art and its relation to subjectivity. In “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (1919), Walter Benjamin argues that whereas for Fichte, the two distinct moments of reflection in the self-positing of the “I”—that is, the positing and the knowledge of that positing—are immediately united in intuition and limited by the concept of the “I” so that an infinite regress of reflection is avoided, Schlegel, in contrast, attempts to hold on to both an immediacy of intuition and an infinity in reflection. It was precisely the romantics’ “cult of the infinite,” as Benjamin calls it, that “divided them from Fichte and lent their thinking its most peculiar and characteristic direction” (126).

For Fichte, then, reflection constitutes the essence of subjectivity and must be referred to the positing “I”; for the romantics, reflection refers to the formal character of thought as such. Insofar as any act of reflection may give rise to a subsequent reflection of which the previous will serve as the object, the romantics observe a kind of ceaseless becoming-form of the content of thinking, where thinking becomes a thinking of thinking, which in turn becomes a thinking of thinking of thinking. At this third (and every subsequent) level lies the romantics’ originality, as Benjamin explains: “The thinking of thinking of thinking can be conceived and performed in two ways. If one starts from the expression ‘thinking of thinking,’ then on the third level this is either the object thought of, thinking (of the thinking of thinking), or else the thinking subject (thinking of thinking) of thinking. The rigorous original form of second-level reflection is assailed and shaken by the ambiguity in third-level reflection” (129). The self-contained reciprocity of the “thinking of thinking,” in other words, is torn open by the addition of a third “thinking,” which may be understood either

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.