The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling by Lauer Christopher.;

The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling by Lauer Christopher.;

Author:Lauer, Christopher.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441115881
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 8

Suspended Reason: Hegel on ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’

As vivid as Hegel’s description of the Bacchanalian frenzy of spirit is, it still presents the movement of reason under only the lowest of resolutions. Under magnification this movement shows itself to be richer, more playful, and far more perverse. For despite its length and obscurity—and thus its relative neglect at the hands of commentators1—the chapter on ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’ is as alive as any in the Phenomenology. Because it presents sprit’s self-conscious effort to define itself in relation to the world, it is, along with the death of God and absolute knowing, one of the most self-reflective of spirit’s moments. While this means that it is the section of the Phenomenology most likely to parody the ‘personal philosophy’ your neighbor on a transcontinental flight offers to share with you upon discovering what you study, it also means that it outlines the motivations of such single-minded strivers as Kepler and Margaret Sanger whom we cannot help but admire for their eccentric passion. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the chapter to an abstract Bildungsroman. Over the course of the chapter we learn that the impulse to find unity in the history of one’s failures, successes, and development is merely one of many ways that reason seeks to flee the facticity of human life. Nor is it quite right to conclude that life itself is the unchanging substance that proves indifferent to all of reason’s endeavors. While it shares with natural desire the inclination to incorporate difference into itself and the ability to experience this difference as indigestion or even poison,2 reason also proves able to suspend this acquisitiveness and simply let its object be. Nor, finally, is the dialectic of reason simply an overcoming of the rational urge to incorporate difference into an identity. It is an exploration of how different self-forgetting obsession, practical failure, and ethical perversion are as forms of difference.3

Shortly into the chapter, Hegel announces, ‘Now that self-consciousness is reason, its hitherto negative relation to otherness turns round into a positive relation’ (H 9: 132, §232) and thus lays out both reason’s task and the dialectical inertia impeding its fulfillment. Unlike in the Identity Philosophy, reason is not the prereflective identity of spirit with its other, nor is it the unity of the concept that has brought all otherness into itself. Rather, it is a relation to its other, and at that a positive one, one that starts out with the simple certainty that it is somehow the same as its other and must learn how to affirm the other as other, to know the truth of its relation to the other. But in contrast to an absolute knowing that has released its self-conception from time, reason still sees itself as a ‘now.’ ‘Now that self-consciousness is reason,’ now that it is no longer merely self-consciousness sunk in a negative relation to the other and has shifted to a mode of being



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