{"id":15766,"date":"2010-08-27T14:55:23","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T18:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=15766"},"modified":"2010-08-27T14:55:23","modified_gmt":"2010-08-27T18:55:23","slug":"frye-on-hegel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/27\/frye-on-hegel\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye on Hegel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"latenotebooks\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hegel is the central philosophical figure in <\/em>Words with Power.\u00a0 In one of his late notebooks, Frye writes, \u201cIf Hegel had written his <\/em>Phenomenology <\/strong>in <\/em>mythos-language instead of in <\/em>logos-language a lot of my work would be done for me.\u00a0 The identification of Substance with Subject-Spirit in the Preface is mythically the central issue of the Reformation, overthrowing the sacramental \u2018spiritual substance\u2019 of the Eucharist & replacing it with the growing Spirit that takes over the Subject.\u201d\u00a0 (<\/em>Late Notebooks, CW 5, 192).\u00a0 Later he writes, \u201cThe rush of ideas I get from Hegel\u2019s <\/em>Phenomenology is so tremendous I can hardly keep up with it.” (<\/em>Late Notebooks, CW 6, 631)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The extent to which Hegel enters into Frye\u2019s thinking as he was writing <\/em>Words with Power and <\/em>The Double Vision can be seen in the following selections from the <\/em>Late Notebooks:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I suppose the whole book turns on the thesis that the spirit is substantial: it\u2019s the realizing of primary concern out of the language (Word) of primary mythology.\u00a0 Only the total Word can make the spirit substantial.\u00a0 Everything else, including Marx\u2019s critique of Hegel, is ideological.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to become a conservative Hegelian, and my goal is not absolute knowledge, whatever that is, but the Word & Spirit set free by each other and united in one substance with the Other detached from Nature and identified as the Father.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t subordinate the female: it wakens and emancipates her, Eros Regained in short.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 establishing of the identity of the other as Father is what makes him the definitive prophet. (CW 5, 9)<\/p>\n

Perhaps I\u2019ve been overlooking the narrative of, first, heaven and earth locked together in a sexual union, second, an Oedipal Son or Logos pushing them apart to form the world of consciousness-creation, third, this Logos growing, like the Begriff<\/em> in Hegel, until Heaven and Earth reach the Tao balance as Father and Spirit. (ibid., 10)<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m right about the Word growing like the Begriff<\/em> in Hegel [previous entry], the Phenomenology<\/em> is an Odyssey as well as a Purgatorio climb.\u00a0 The Odyssey is the cycle redeemed, beginning & ending at home<\/em>; the Purgatorio is the climb to polarization. (ibid., 11)<\/p>\n

Hegel himself calls the Ph. [Phenomenology<\/em>] a ladder (II.2.5). (ibid., 18)<\/p>\n

Forms of spiritual growth: the father-soul and the mother-body (dying to) bring forth the spirit-child.\u00a0 I think this is alchemic.\u00a0 Odyssey pattern: the old beggar, least likely to succeed, growing in reverse of ordinary aging until he becomes not just master of the house but the body of the house.\u00a0 Hegel\u2019s Begriff<\/em>, the infant exposed and abandoned by the common-sense world, turning out to be the Prospero of the whole show. (ibid., 18)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve often said that Hegel\u2019s Ph G [Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes<\/em>] interests me deeply in itself, but not as a preface to Hegel\u2019s system.\u00a0 This is linked on my part with my feeling that Moses was the only person who ever saw the Promised Land.\u00a0 The system is only a Prussian Canaan. (ibid., 19)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Word-Spirit dialogue is slowly assuming a spiral or ladder shape: it conceivably might work out to a counterpart of Hegel\u2019s Ph [Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>], only in images instead of concepts, with a religion of parable forming its crisis.\u00a0 And, of course, there\u2019s the other great hope that it would follow the four levels of meaning. (ibid., 19)<\/p>\n

\u201cGod is God only insofar as he knows himself: {this} is a self-consciousness in man and man\u2019s knowledge of God that goes on to man\u2019s knowing himself in God.\u201d\u00a0 Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of History, in Kaufman, 273. If I, so ignorant of Hegel, feel that I understand this better than a first-rate Hegel scholar does, I must be onto something, if I\u2019m right.\u00a0 Only, of course, the real verb isn\u2019t \u201cknow.\u201d (ibid., 21)<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s Ph<\/em> [Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>] is founded on the type of spiral staircase that can exist only in thought: one that starts at an apex (wrong word, of course) and expands as it goes up.\u00a0 Wonder if I could find this in Shelley or elsewhere: of course there are descending narrowing movements like those in De Quincey. (ibid., 33\u20134)<\/p>\n

Marx is supposed to have inverted Hegel by saying that Hegel\u2019s dialectic would only make sense if it were transformed from ideology to material historical forces. But capitalism has matured only to the extent that it has been subjected to socialist revisionism, and communism has matured only to the extent that it has taken on bourgeois & consumerist revisions.\u00a0 It looks as though Hegel were right after all, & that the real Armageddon is a verbal & dialectical one. The Chinese admit this, up to a point: Russians & Americans still refuse to do so.\u00a0 When a myth leads to action, the action invariably perverts the myth.\u00a0 (Social<\/em> action, anyway.) (ibid., 65)<\/p>\n

The spiritual world is the order of being in which what is in this world expressible only by metaphor becomes existential.\u00a0 To reach this we have to go beyond the unities of myth and metaphor to a completely decentered and interpenetrating universe: the stage represented by the decentered Bible. Perhaps all this last note means is that I haven\u2019t yet really understood Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em>.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t know: I have no interest or belief in absolute knowledge: I may be climbing the same spiral mountain, but by a different path.\u00a0 The hypostasis of the hoped-for, the elenchos of the unseen [Hebrews 11:1].\u00a0 If I could articulate that in my own words, I could burn the straw and pass on (I\u2019m thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas on his deathbed.)\u00a0 Hegel is a Gnostic, of course, and while I have a great respect for Gnostics, I don\u2019t altogether trust them.\u00a0 At their<\/em> point of death there\u2019s a separation of physical body and spirit, but their spirit is patterned on the soul or mind, & isn\u2019t a real spiritual body. (ibid., 188\u20139)<\/p>\n

The merging of reader and icon leads to interpenetration, but at that stage the reader is no longer an individual but one with the universal reader.\u00a0 The poet doesn\u2019t purify his authority until he\u2019s got rid of his ego, and the critic is not a real reader until he\u2019s taken his wig off & stopped trying to be a judge.\u00a0 That takes him into the interpenetrating universe of symbol and spirit.\u00a0 The literary work is now the symbol of literature, in the two senses of symbol: it\u2019s a symbolon completed by the whole of literature, and a symbolos that is an augury or epitome of literature.\u00a0 The augury foretells: the symbolos as augury has a temporal dimension too, in absorbing the time-identity of the reader.\u00a0 This I suppose is where typology as conditional prophecy comes in.\u00a0 But Hegel also speaks of the soul becoming Spirit as it proceeds up his spiral: that is, it goes up in a metamorphosis or transfiguration. (ibid., 193)<\/p>\n

Wonder if Hegel has any clear idea of where<\/em> spirit takes over from soul.\u00a0 Eliot at least would locate such a point: the Ara vos prec<\/em> speech in Dante. (ibid., 194)<\/p>\n

Three and Six, or symbol and spirit, are likely to be based very largely on Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology and Kant\u2019s Critique of Judgment.\u00a0 Hebrews defines faith as the hypostasis of the hoped-for, and I\u2019ve given reasons for thinking that hypostasis here means the traditional \u201csubstance,\u201d and not Paul\u2019s \u201cassurance.\u201d\u00a0 Two questions: if we accept the Hegelian thesis that the true substance is subject, where does that take us? (ibid., 195)<\/p>\n

I think some of the extra papers now crowding into my mind will get cannibalized.\u00a0 The one on \u201cFairies & Elementals\u201d could go into one of the secular Bibles, probably the Adonis one.\u00a0 And I think a lot of my \u201clyric\u201d introduction should be expanded and placed in Two.\u00a0 First, the mental change from linear improvisation to \u201cverse\u201d is a change in awareness.\u00a0 Also the resonance section could do with some expansion\u2014the aural counterpart of apocalyptic vision\u2014incidentally, that\u2019s a factor that can\u2019t be absorbed in the visual stage, & is thus probably the entering wedge for the reexamining of the experience.\u00a0 Tolstoy\u2019s WP [War and Peace<\/em>] with the Russian complications about mir<\/em>.\u00a0 Translation and its \u201csense\u201d cuts off this re-examination to some degree.\u00a0 Hegel & aufgehoben. (ibid.)<\/p>\n

The Bible says that God created man and that the Word became flesh.\u00a0 This on Hegelian principles contains the fact that man makes (himself) God (which he can do demonically or apocalyptically) and that his flesh (soul-body) becomes Word, or intelligibility.\u00a0 The two are complementary, not contradictory. (ibid., 219\u201320)<\/p>\n

Look at the Chapman Tears of Peace quote again (for a footnote) and find out where Soul becomes Spirit in Hegel. (ibid., 231)<\/p>\n

In the myth-metaphor world all truth is paradox: a Hegelian thesis where thesis contains and implies antithesis, but lives with it and doesn\u2019t transcend it.\u00a0 A is\/isn\u2019t B.\u00a0 This did\/didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 Maritain derives the person or individual from the Incarnation, which releases the Self from the idolatry of things; but the individual doesn\u2019t come from there: he comes from society.\u00a0 In insisting on this Marxism had the real principle.\u00a0 But it\u2019s only in the individual that paradox can exist, as only Self can enter the interpenetrating world.\u00a0 I was always shocked by the Marxist use of \u201cthe masses.\u201d (ibid., 245)<\/p>\n

The \u201csubject\u201d swallows everything objective to it: hence the pan-historical critics of today, the Hegelian pan-philosophical absolute knowledge, the pan-literary universe which only three people understand: Blake, Mallarm\u00e9, and myself.\u00a0 The final<\/em> answer, naturally, is interpenetration. (ibid., 247)<\/p>\n

There are four main bodies of verbal expression.\u00a0 Two are mythical and rhetorical: one of them is literature, the other the area I\u2019ve been calling ideology.\u00a0 The other two use logos language, one constructively, the other descriptively.\u00a0 In descriptive language centripetal features like figured speech and ambiguity are minimized:\u00a0 they can\u2019t be abolished, but they are subordinated.\u00a0 The constructive sphere of logos is metaphysical: descriptive writing is words in front of physika, constructive writing is works behind or after ta physika. [The word metaphysics<\/em> derives from t\u00a0ag met\u00a0ag t\u00a0ag physik\u00a0aa (the [works] after the physics), a reference to the arrangement of Aristotle\u2019s writings.]\u00a0 Constructive writing is generated out of ambiguity and metaphor.\u00a0 Literature represents the maximum concentration of figuration, and the ideological area uses rhetoric kinetically.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always suspected, too, a Hegelian form of polysemy.\u00a0 Descriptive writing, corresponding to immediate sensation, is aufgehoben<\/em> [That is, such writing is negated while at the same time it passes into a new form.\u00a0 For Frye, as for Hegel, aufheben<\/em> suggested several meanings at once: to cancel, to preserve, and to lift up.] into constructive writing: that in turn is caught up into the metaphorical & rhetorical structure of ideology.\u00a0 Then that\u2019s caught up in the poetic, where the centripetal is at its most concentrated.\u00a0 That may bring me back to conventional meanings of \u201cliteral.\u201d\u00a0 (ibid., 258\u20139)<\/p>\n

Eventually the sense of the simultaneity in the structure separates out as the antithesis of recording.\u00a0 The antithesis, then, in Hegelian fashion, swallows its opposite and we have dialectic, where A \u201cfollows\u201d from B.\u00a0 The highest development of this is the metaphysical system, which is generated out of the metaphors and ambiguities still lurking in the language.\u00a0 Also, of course, out of the syntax.\u00a0 This is what is best called logos language, which I should drop for what I\u2019ve now got it for. (ibid., 260)<\/p>\n

[W]e read a book about history or gardening or aeronautics.\u00a0 When we try to understand it as a whole we see that it is an assertive verbal structure related to, etc.\u00a0 Assertive verbal structures, that is, dialectical arguments culminating in metaphysical systems, come next.\u00a0 We try to understand St. Thomas Aquinas or Leibnitz or Hegel & find that they are historically & culturally conditioned products, i.e., works of ideology.\u00a0 We look at ideological structures and find them products of poetic myths and metaphors.\u00a0 We look at literary structures and find them products of a totality of imaginative vision (Tao, apocalypse, various Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem terms) where the subject-object and time-space distinctions no longer exist. [See WP<\/em>, 118.]\u00a0 Behind the \u201ccode of art\u201d I don\u2019t think we can go. (ibid., 261)<\/p>\n

Start then where you always start, with the centripetal-centrifugal dichotomy.\u00a0 The progression that follows is not historical: it\u2019s almost the reverse of historical.\u00a0 First come the two phases of the Aristotelian mimetic.\u00a0 I no longer think Aristotle is talking about art & nature: I think he\u2019s talking about two kinds of logos-writing.\u00a0 Naive mimesis is descriptive writing, corresponding to Hegel\u2019s certainty of immediacy. [See pt. C, ch. AA (\u201cReason\u201d) of Hegel\u2019s Phenonemology of Spirit<\/em>.]\u00a0 Here the verbal reproduces something objective at secondhand: in other words we read to gain information about something outside the words.\u00a0 Here language has to minimize ambiguity and figuration: the one-to-one relationship of signifier to signified is emphasized as far as possible.\u00a0 It\u2019s not completely possible, of course: its great strength, however, is in its capacity to create the categories of \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cfact.\u201d\u00a0 Even the arts appeal to this level: \u201cI just paint what I see\u201d; \u201ca camera dawdling down a lane,\u201d & other metaphors appropriating truth & fact for their vision. [See Words with Power<\/em>, 8\u20139; \u201ca camera dawdling down a lane\u201d is NF\u2019s twist on Stendhal\u2019s remark that \u201ca novel is a mirror walking along a highway\u201d (The Red and the Black<\/em>, chap. 39 (or, in some editions, pt. 2, ch. 19).] (ibid., 263)<\/p>\n

For Socrates the word justice can exist only in a world where such words mean what they ought to mean.\u00a0 To mean is to acquire power.\u00a0 So he accepts the challenge of his disciples, and proceeds to set up a counter-world, a society illustrating the meaning of justice.\u00a0 Such a world can exist within the individual, whether it exists within society (or as a society) or not.\u00a0 Modern synonyms for original sin, like \u201cfascism[,]\u201d refer to the isolating of power, holding power without the need of rationalizing it.\u00a0 Socrates, like Hegel, is trying to build a verbal structure that will contain power.\u00a0 That\u2019s the bigger irony Plato is aware of. (ibid., 264)<\/p>\n

Critics, or people adopting that position, are curious people: because I\u2019m fascinated by the spiral-staircase shape of Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em>, I\u2019m immediately described as a Hegelian.\u00a0 Partisanship is even more automatically assumed in philosophy than in literature. (ibid., 361)<\/p>\n

Hegel thought that Xy [Christianity] was a mythological anticipation of the real truth of his own philosophy; [\u201dRevealed Religion,\u201d Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>, 453\u201378.] that makes him at least an honest philosopher, or rather theologian: all theologians attach belief only to their idioms. (ibid., 362)<\/p>\n

Another thing that interests me about Hegel is the eating or cannibal image that ought to be my chapter Seven basis.\u00a0 The Absolute eats everything up to itself, like Pantagruel in Rabelais II: the Begriff starts at the hidden centre & ends as the circumference.\u00a0 In that sense the Phenomenology is an Odyssey, because that\u2019s what Odysseus does in the last twelve books.\u00a0 But after you\u2019ve eaten everything you to have to divide again to love or to reproduce.\u00a0 That\u2019s why Xy [Christianity] is so uneasy with any identification with God that goes beyond loving God.\u00a0 But you do go beyond, that God may be all in all [1 Corinthians 1:28]. (ibid.)<\/p>\n

Repetition develops, in a Hegelian way, spirally & through aufhebung, in three stages.\u00a0 In the first stage freedom, existing in pure experience, dreads repetition as the thing that would spoil it; in the second it comes to terms with it, and as it were harnesses its energy (this is the habitus<\/em>-repetition I got from Butler, though S.K. doubtless wouldn\u2019t think so); in the third freedom & repetition are identified, where repetition is eternity and a new creation.\u00a0 It\u2019s heaven, in short, just as Nietzsche\u2019s recurrence is hell, the place Antichrist goes to prepare for his disciples. (ibid., 363)<\/p>\n

Re my note on Hegel [previous entry]: what he did in theory Kierkegaard does in practice, closing off his \u201cliterary\u201d works with their pseudonyms and starting his \u201cedifying\u201d works with prayers.\u00a0 As I say, he achieves the opposite of this: his great books are literary, with metaliterary features: there are no \u201clevels.\u201d\u00a0 He invariably says his most valuable things in the \u201cliterary\u201d works, where he can pop on a mask and disclaim responsibility. [See Words with Power<\/em>, 115\u201316.] (ibid., 363)<\/p>\n

Find out where Hegel\u2019s Ph. [Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>] switches from soul to spirit, & put in (if you can find it) that remarkable passage from Kierkegaard\u2019s diary about exposing oneself late to Xy [Christianity]. (ibid., 369)<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em> and the \u201clevels\u201d of meaning; re-establishment of the literal and the progress to the anagogic or death-facing on that basis. (Late Notebooks<\/em>, CW 6, 436)<\/p>\n

Part Four is wide open: it includes whatever I can find to say about Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology, the four levels of meaning, the Druid analogy and its apocalyptic vortex, and the like.\u00a0 I seem to have talked myself into sixteen chapters, which I hope will fold up into eight, in accordance with my usual accordion tactics. (ibid., 437)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why I talk about Heidegger for the Hermes chapter, except that he\u2019s a digger and I\u2019m thinking of the ending as going down with the psychopomp.\u00a0 Hegel\u2019s a climber, of course.\u00a0 But clearly one of the things I have to do is work out my suggestion in GC [The Great Code<\/em>] that the Phenomenology is the four levels of meaning again, and provides a scheme for working out the implications of the royal metaphor. <\/strong>(ibid., 452)<\/p>\n

The conclusion would start, I suppose, with combining the downward authority and the upward human effort, the two together being the Tao, the axis of stability between heaven and earth.\u00a0 I doubt if I\u2019ll ever get to the point of writing a chapter on the total symbolic universe, or what I used to call the Druid analogy; but two things I have to be concerned with are, first, dropping in another view of the structure of the Bible as the pectin coagulating the whole argument; and, second, a return to the four levels of polysemous meaning via Hegel. (ibid., 468)<\/p>\n

Anyway, Hegel ought to be the climax of the first half, the fulfilment of wisdom as far as the archetype of climbing the ladder goes. (ibid., 480)<\/p>\n

The great Promethean theme is the recovery of romance and myth, a post-Hegelian climb, not to absolute knowledge but to absolute vision.\u00a0 Poe\u2019s Eureka ends in a vision of concentration and diffusion\u2014systole-diastole movement.\u00a0 Has something for a scientific world of astronomy and the sub-atomic\u2014I don\u2019t know what the metaphorical equivalent is. (ibid., 482)<\/p>\n

I can see that everything belongs in it that\u2019s simple follow-up of The Great Code<\/em>, except for the four levels of meaning.\u00a0 And maybe that belongs in the Eros chapter: otherwise there isn\u2019t much for it\u2014well, there is if I include the historical Eros poetry stuff.\u00a0 But the sublimation of Love has been traditional since Plato, and I used to say that Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology climb was up the ladder of love. (ibid., 499)<\/p>\n

I suggest, however, that there is a practical and common-sense distinction which leads us to call Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em> a poem, whatever its philosophical importance, and Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em> a philosophical document, whatever its literary importance.\u00a0 This brings us into the other aspect of literature, as an art along with music, painting, sculpture and architecture.\u00a0 Here we soon see different areas of emphasis.\u00a0 Words are still signifiers, but our main concern in this context is the relation of signifiers to each other, the signifier-signified relation being still there but subordinated.\u00a0 The resonance of signifiers is what the reader of literature, more especially poetry, contemplates first of all: it is the importance of this resonance that we hear in all the rhyme, assonance, alliteration and metrical patterns of literature, where sound is as important as sense. (ibid., 501)<\/p>\n

Part Three, the Cycle of the Spirit, deals with the reintegrating of the antithesis set up in Part One, the four powers of the soul each having two poles.\u00a0 Two chapters on imagery-space and narrative-time seem to be involved; Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology will be used a good deal, particularly in such things as the passing of the white goddess of the Adonis cycle into the black bride of the Hermes one.\u00a0 The eleventh chapter will be a summary of my Bible book in terms that bring it into contemporary focus within a general overview of contemporary symbolism. (ibid., 524)<\/p>\n

So I still have to work out a series of temporal patterns on the rising grid.\u00a0 That won\u2019t be easy: I\u2019ve never thought about this.\u00a0 I suppose Hegelian dialectical incorporation of the negative is one of them. (ibid., 575)<\/p>\n

One thing I haven\u2019t thought much about is the connection of the ladder with articulate speech: the Tower of Babel story is a story of confusion of language, its antitype the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost.\u00a0 I suppose Homer\u2019s \u201cwinged words\u201d are in the ladder context syntactical or progression-words, the steady climb of dialectic towards its goal.\u00a0 (Donne says the angels, who can fly, nevertheless use the ladder in Jacob\u2019s vision.) That\u2019s why Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology belongs to the complex, as well as Dante\u2019s chain-rhyme scheme. (ibid., 584)<\/p>\n

The theme I want for the third lecture takes me into fields I\u2019m ill prepared to enter, and unless I can connect it with something already central in me I don\u2019t know how I can complete it in time.\u00a0 The general idea is that harmony, reconciliation (whether of God and man or of two arguments) and agreement are all terms relating to propositional language.\u00a0 The poetic counterpart is what I\u2019ve been calling interpenetration, the concrete order in which everything is everywhere at once.\u00a0 Whitehead\u2019s SMW [Science and the Modern World] says this in so many words: I must have got it from there originally, though I thought I got it from Suzuki\u2019s remarks about the Avatamsaka Sutra.\u00a0 (I can\u2019t make any sense out of these infernal Sutras: they seem designed for people who really can\u2019t read).\u00a0 The general line is, I think, anti-Hegelian: Hegel showed how the thesis involved its own antithesis, although I think the \u201csynthesis\u201d has been foisted on him by his followers.\u00a0 Anyway, the expansion to absolute knowledge is too close to what Blake calls the smile of a fool.\u00a0 My goal would be something like absolute experience rather than absolute knowledge: in experience the units are unique, and things don\u2019t agree with each other; they mirror each other. (ibid., 616)<\/p>\n

Seems to me there may be two layers of historical perspective in the Bible: the linear one that descends to Hegel and Marx and their illusions of an ideal to be reached in the future, and the post-Easter history where everything is totally decentralized in the present, and is apocalyptic rather than millennial. (ibid., 617)<\/p>\n

I have four primary concerns: Hegel has just one, namely freedom.\u00a0 I think all history is evolving spiritually towards fucking and a bottle, like Rabelais.\u00a0 Nobody knows what to do with freedom: they do know what to do with a bottle and a cunt. (ibid., 620)<\/p>\n

Wild pitch: the nineteenth century was Kant\u2019s century, with its critical approach to the speculative reason, the practical reason, and cultural tradition.\u00a0 The twentieth was Hegel\u2019s century, with its expanding dialectic which could be either revolutionary or reactionary.\u00a0 Wonder if Schelling\u2019s posthumous philosophies of myth and revelation could possibly come through in the twenty-first.\u00a0 Schelling sounds like a rather silly man in some ways: I wish though I could read philosophical German fluently enough to know.\u00a0 According to Wellek, Coleridge stole enough from him to make him a significant figure (that\u2019s not of course his moral). (ibid., 623)<\/p>\n

]\u00a0 Hegel seem to be retracing Kant\u2019s three critiques in his own way: first reason as an observing quality, working within categories imposed by the physical nature of the human body and observing only a phenomenal world.\u00a0 Second the fact that consciousness means primarily a conscious will, an active being, and a practical rather than a speculative reason that can find something akin to it within (or whatever) the thing in itself.\u00a0 Third the critical reaction itself, aware of a purposiveness without purpose, as though there were purpose.\u00a0 Kant\u2019s judgment (Urteilskraft) is where Hegel\u2019s \u201cSpirit\u201d emerges.\u00a0 Hegel\u2019s master and slave passages take in Morris\u2019s point: in medieval society the workers, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, were also the creators.\u00a0 The aristocracy put on a big show, but it was all tinsel and showoff, part of the dissolving phantasmagoria of history.\u00a0 Human society starts with the union of Adam and Eve; with the fall the relation of Adam and Eve becomes the nexus of the master-slave relation, which expands from that.\u00a0 Hegel seems to overlook, or not be interested in, this point.\u00a0 The oedipal desire to kill the father and fuck the mother modulates into the desire to be the father and spank hell out of the mother.\u00a0 Jung seems to be saying that the anima or feminine principle grows out of the shadow, or projected evil principle.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never liked his man-anima and woman-animus set-up: I think both have both, so the above could be readily reversed.\u00a0 Hegel thinks the subservience of slave to master is an essential stage in his development.\u00a0 Maybe he\u2019ll say later that the only genuine form of subservience is to one\u2019s art or craft or vocation, which is so often metaphorically called a master. (ibid., 631)<\/p>\n

If it was Vico who began the philosophy of history, it was Hegel who saw that a philosophy of history had to include a history of philosophy.\u00a0 Philosophy begins in an assertion of territoriality; it grows and diversifies through criticism, dispute, \u201crefutation,\u201d and so on; but its real being is in a tradition of consensus.\u00a0 Every poem is \u201cunique,\u201d in the soft-headed phrase, and \u201carchetype spotting\u201d is a facile and futile procedure; but the traditions and conventions of poetry make a shape and a meaning.\u00a0 They move toward a future (emergence of primary concerns), and they expand into a wider present. (ibid., 641)<\/p>\n

The \u201csubject\u201d is the psychological subject, which can\u2019t think, can\u2019t create, can\u2019t do anything except complain about its \u201cbody\u201d (persona problems), until it hitches on to something traditional.\u00a0 Hegel calls it the unhappy consciousness.\u00a0 So it attaches itself to Christianity, Marxism, feminism, or whatever, and starts blathering the clich\u00e9s of what it (so far) only believes it believes.\u00a0 Out of that eventually the true individual emerges with a \u201cunique\u201d addition to make to it.\u00a0 What this is has two aspects: it\u2019s an element in a tradition or convention, and it\u2019s all that unique shit. (ibid., 641\u20132)<\/p>\n

Myths that start at the time or historical end are always pathological: evolution is not a myth, but the gradualist reconstructions of it are.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the mythology of this Hegelian century of total history is all pathological.\u00a0 One after another of these historicized myths blow up: efforts to show that phenomenon A must precede phenomenon B because the writer thinks it\u2019s more \u201cprimitive\u201d disintegrate; but the farce goes on. (ibid., 646)<\/p>\n

The closing passages of Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology include my distinction in GC [The Great Code<\/em>] between the panoramic and the participating apocalypse.\u00a0 Perhaps TWO is about the panoramic one, the recognition of a spiritual picture as one form of two distinguishable worlds.\u00a0 Then THREE could deal with the integration of the two in kerygma. (ibid., 650)<\/p>\n

No, the real theme of Three is the contrast between the apocalyptic and the millennial, the pan-historical vision focused on a future versus the vision of the expanded present, the world of physical concerns taking on a spiritual dimension.\u00a0 Hegel really tried to reach the apocalyptic conclusion in spite of his pan-historical perspective: Marx isolated the millennial element in it, the pure donkey\u2019s carrot of just you wait.\u00a0 The great strength of the New Testament was in the fact that its future was thought to be just around the corner: hence the abysmal fatuity of Paul whenever he gets on such subjects as what do we do right now with our women.\u00a0 As centuries passed, the future kept retreating, and now after two thousand years we ought to be getting the point that there\u2019s never anything in the future except more future. (ibid., 653\u20134)<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology turns on a gigantic metaphor of a mirror, which is where we get the words speculation and reflection.\u00a0 The mirror is the central image of an identity of subject and object which nevertheless preserve their difference.\u00a0 Once they\u2019re identified, we break out of the prison of Narcissus, as I call it in WP [Words with Power<\/em>]. (ibid., 660)<\/p>\n

Section Three: the conception of \u201clevels\u201d of meaning, preserved in Hegel\u2019s metaphor of Aufhebung. <\/strong>(ibid., 683)<\/p>\n

Section Five: the conception of \u201clevels\u201d of meaning, preserved in Hegel\u2019s Aufhebung.\u00a0 The Dante scheme as founded on the wrong kind of literalism.\u00a0 The rejection of corresponding history re-establishes the Bible as a historical entity, with the example of Gibbon. (ibid., 686)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hegel is the central philosophical figure in Words with Power.\u00a0 In one of his late notebooks, Frye writes, \u201cIf Hegel had written his Phenomenology in mythos-language instead of in logos-language a lot of my work would be done for me.\u00a0 The identification of Substance with Subject-Spirit in the Preface is mythically the central issue of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,67,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-frye-on-philosophy","category-notebooks"],"yoast_head":"\nFrye on Hegel - 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