Philosophy, Freedom, Language, and their Others: Contemporary Legacies of German Idealism [1 ed.] 9781350340091, 9781350340107, 9781350340114

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PHILOSOPHY, FREEDOM, LANGUAGE, AND THEIR OTHERS

Also available from Bloomsbury: Difficult Freedom and Radical Evil in Kant, by Joel Madore Freedom after Kant, edited by Joe Saunders Kant’s Rational Religion and the Radical Enlightenment, by Anna Tomaszewska The Human Vocation in German Philosophy, edited by Anne Pollok and Courtney D. Fugate

PHILOSOPHY, FREEDOM, LANGUAGE, AND THEIR OTHERS

Contemporary Legacies of German Idealism

Edited by Elias Kifon Bongmba and Robert Manzinger

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Elias Kifon Bongmba, Robert Manzinger and Contributors, 2023 Elias Kifon Bongmba and Robert Manzinger have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Monument to Immanuel Kant in autumn. Kaliningrad (© Irina Borsuchenko / Shutterstock) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-4009-1 ePDF: 978-1-3503-4010-7 eBook: 978-1-3503-4011-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Notes on Contributors vii Forewordxi Jere Surber PHILOSOPHY AND THEIR OTHERS Elias Kifon Bongmba and Robert Manzinger

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HEGEL: FROM REASON TO FREEDOM William Maker

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HEGEL’S SPECULATIVE SENTENCE: FREEDOM FROM PRESUPPOSITIONS Stephen Houlgate

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HEGEL’S SPECULATIVE SENTENCE: AN ONTO-GRAMMATICAL READING OF “LORDSHIP AND BONDAGE” Jeffrey Reid

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REMEMBERING THE FUTURE: FREEDOM FROM SLAVERY Jared Nieft

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FREEDOM AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN IN KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT Frank Schalow

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SURBER AND KRIPKE ON A POSTERIORI NECESSITY William D. Anderson

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FREEDOM AT RISK: GUY DEBORD, DONALD TRUMP, AND THE STATE OF THE SPECTACLE Gary Percesepe

THE CULTURAL DIMENSION OF SPECIAL NEWS PROGRAMS: FREEDOM AND AESTHETICS AS A MEANS OF COPING WITH EXTREME EVENTS Andreas Dörner and Ludgera Vogt

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THE FREEDOM OF KANT’S LANGUAGE OF THE SUBLIME IN CONTEMPORARY NOVELS AND ITS METACRITIQUE: ON DON DELILLO’S “WHITE NOISE” AND KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD’S “THE END” Miglena Dikova-Milanova 135 “INTERSECTIONS: MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF PATRIMONY IN DANIEL BUREN’S DEUX PLATEAUX”

Shaw Smith

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HUMOR AS A PHILOSOPHICAL-RELIGIOUS BOUNDARY IN SOREN KIERKEGAARD’S CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT, EMBODIED BY THE HOSPITAL CHAPLAIN AS A WISE FOOL Robert Manzinger

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MANDELA’S LEGAL AND SPIRITUAL POLITICS Elias Kifon Bongmba

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Bibliography201 Index211

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS William Maker received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 1978 and taught from 1979 until his retirement in 2017 in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Clemson University, South Carolina. His specialty was nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, in particular, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He is best known for his important book, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (1994), in which he defended, with characteristic clarity and energy, the claim that Hegel’s system is a “nonfoundational philosophy” that unfolds autonomously without given presuppositions. Maker also edited Hegel on Economics and Freedom (1987) and Hegel and Aesthetics (SUNY Press, 2000), and published numerous articles on Hegel’s philosophies of nature, history, and religion. He served as vice-president of the Hegel Society of America from 1994 to 1996 and as president from 2008 to 2010. He had a passion for philosophy and freedom (and Harley-Davidsons). Stephen Houlgate is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (1986), An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (1991, 2nd ed. 2005), The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2013), and Hegel on Being, 2 vols. (2022). He is also the editor of Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature and The Hegel Reader (both 1998), Hegel and the Arts (2007) and G.W.F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (2008), and co-editor with Michael Baur of A Companion to Hegel (2011). He served as vice-president and president of the Hegel Society of America and was editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain from 1998 to 2006. He is currently president of the Hegel Society of Great Britain. Jeffrey Reid is a full professor of philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He has published numerous articles, in English and French, on Hegel, German Idealism and Early German Romanticism in such journals as Clio, Owl of Minerva, Hegel Bulletin, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Idealistic Studies, and Archives de Philosophie. Monograph books include Hegel’s Grammatical Ontology: Vanishing Words and Hermeneutical Openness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Bloomsbury, 2021), The Anti-romantic: Hegel against Ironic Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Real Words: Language and System in Hegel (University of Toronto Press, 2007). Book chapters include “Objective Language and Scientific Truth in Hegel,” in Jere Surber’s (ed.) Hegel and Language (2006). Reid’s philosophical approach is informed by his studies at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, under such maîtres de pensée as Henri Birault, Jacques Rivelaygue, and Jean-François Marquet.

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Frank Schalow is professor of philosophy and University Research Professor at the University of New Orleans. His books include Heidegger’s Ecological Turn: Community and Practice for Future Generations (2021), Departures: At the Crossroads between Heidegger and Kant (2013), The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (1992), along with the co-edited volume The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought: Historical and Critical Essays (2014). He is also co-editor of the international journal, Heidegger Studies. Schalow graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in philosophy in 1978, and received his PhD from Tulane University in 1984. Jared Nieft is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Denver. His teaching and research interests include post-Kantian German philosophy, twentieth-century phenomenology, and critical theory. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology Joint Doctoral Program. He is presently working on a paper titled, “The Material Transformation of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus.” William D. Anderson is emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, Denver, CO. He graduated from the University of Omaha, BA in 1964; did MA from University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1966; and earned PhD from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1976. His teaching and research interests have been philosophical and formal logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphilosophy, and philosophy of affective neuroscience. Gary Percesepe is the author of eleven books, including Future(s) of Philosophy: The Marginal Thinking of Jacques Derrida, and Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Review as one of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Denver, where he wrote his master’s thesis on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship under the supervision of Jere Surber, and a PhD in postmodern French philosophy from Saint Louis University, where he was research assistant to James Collins. Percesepe is associate editor at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review) where he has worked closely with Executive Editor Frederick Barthelme for a quarter century. Prior to that, he was assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review. His fiction, poetry, personal essays, and interviews have appeared in The Sun, Greensboro Review, Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Wigleaf, Brevity, PANK, Short Story America, The Millions, Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, and other places. His most recent poetry collections are Gaslight Opera and Light Turnout. He lives with his family in White Plains, New York, where he is Senior Pastor of The Congregational Church in the Highlands (a progressive church in the United Church of Christ) and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx. Prof. Dr. phil. Ludgera Vogt, born in 1962, is a professor of sociology at the University of Wuppertal. She studied German studies, art, and social sciences at

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the University of Essen. Her doctorate was carried out on the subject of honor in modern society at the University of Regensburg, her habilitation with an empirical study on civil society in the Ruhr area at TU Dortmund. Her current research focuses on political sociology, cultural and media sociology. Prof. Dr. Andreas Dörner, born in 1960, is a professor of media studies with a focus on television at Philipps University Marburg. He studied German studies and social sciences at the University of Essen, where he received his doctorate degree in political science in 1994 with a thesis on political myths. He habilitated at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in 1998 with a thesis on political entertainment culture in the United States. His research focuses on political communication and entertainment culture. Miglena Dikova-Milanova is a lecturer of Bulgarian Language and Culture at the Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University. Her research interests include literary history and criticism, philosophy of culture, aesthetics and classic and contemporary Balkan and Eastern European literature, in particular M.  Bulgakov, A. Popov, and G. Gospodinov. Miglena Dikova-Milanova holds a PhD in philosophy from K U Leuven on the topic of “Kant and the Cultural Politics of the Sublime” which she defended in 2008. Shaw Smith is the Joel O. Conarroe Professor of Art History at Davidson College where he has served for about forty years except for a two-year period at the University of Denver (1984–6) when he helped create and co-teach “The Making of the Modern Mind” a collaborative course led by Professor Jere Surber. As an undergraduate, Smith was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in English (1971). He completed his MA and PhD in art history (1982) from UNC-CH which included a year of graduate study at the Sorbonne. His teaching includes courses on American Art, eighteenth-century European art, and contemporary art as well as specialized seminars in subjects such as Bearden, Courbet, David, Delacroix, Impressionism, Orientalism, Romanticism, Art of Paris, Art of Spain, Art of the American South, and Post-Modernism. In Spring 2022, he was awarded the Omicron Delta Kappa Teaching Award at Davidson College. His scholarship and publications have focused on French art and particularly that of the romantic artist, Eugène Delacroix. He has made academic presentations in many countries including Scotland, Ireland, France, Cuba, Spain, Russia, and Mexico. In Paris, he has given many lectures including seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a lecture at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. Robert Manzinger earned his PhD at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, in the area of philosophy, theology, and cultural studies, with a dissertation on philosophical ethics entitled, “The Ethics of the Other.” He worked

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as teaching assistant for the multidisciplinary core program, “The Making of the Modern Mind,” when Jere Surber was director. Manzinger taught philosophy, theology, ethics, and intellectual history among other subjects at a number of schools and seminaries, including the University of Denver, Colorado State University, Temple University, and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served churches in New Jersey, Colorado, and Pennsylvania as a pastor for thirty years. Manzinger has published journal articles on theology, and contributed essays for books on Emmanuel Levinas and Soren Kierkegaard. Most recently, he became a hospital chaplain, first at Geisinger Medical Center, and now at UPMC Williamsport. Elias Kifon Bongmba is the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Chair in Christian theology and professor of religion at Rice University where he teaches African Religions and World Christianity. Bongmba studied philosophy of religion with Professor Jere Surber and earned his PhD from the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. He served as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion from 2010 to 2020. His current research focuses on the LGBTQI debates in Africa. Jere Surber pursued graduate work in classics and philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University and the Rheinische Universität/Bonn (PhD, 1974). He has served on the faculty of the University of Denver since 1974 (now Professor Emeritus), with visiting research/teaching professorships at such institutions as the universities of Mainz and Bochum (BRD), Tromsa (Norway), Leuven (Belgium), and Oxford (UK). He has published numerous books and articles in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, cultural theory and critique, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Most recently, he served from 2018 to 2022 as the president of the Hegel Society of America and is currently writing a work on Musicology and the Philosophy of Music.

FOREWORD Jere Surber When my former doctoral students and now longtime friends Elias Bongmba and Robert Manzinger approached me about their organizing a Festschrift in honor of my retirement from academic active duty, I think they’ll recall that my response was immediate and firm. “Your time would be far better spent moving forward with your own work and so would my time and that of other potential contributors,” I told them. As has so often happened over my career, however, my view was not so much proved wrong as (in a characteristic Hegelian expression) “aufgehoben,” at once affirmed, negated, and raised to a “higher level.” It was affirmed, at least in my own case, since they pretty much proceeded without soliciting any input from me other than requesting a few names of potential contributors (whom, I assumed, would likely agree with my own initial assessment and that would be the end of it). That my stance was likewise negated is proved by the successful production of the volume that now lies before you. As to raising my initial thoughts about the project to a “higher level,” a bit more discussion is necessary. One cannot read far into Hegel without discovering that any idea that is “posited” (thanks for this term, Herr Professor Fichte!), after passing through the fires of critical negation, inevitably returns to its source elevated, transformed, and enriched. That was my own quite powerful and deeply affecting experience upon finally receiving and reading the essays and editorial comments of the actual volume that had been proposed a couple of years earlier. The word that immediately came to mind to describe my feelings was “gratitude.” I was and am thankful, first, to Elias and Rob for initially suggesting a project that I myself resisted, knowing the amount of time and effort that such an undertaking requires of both editors and contributors (and I have, over my career, served in both roles, so my knowledge and attendant reservations were certainly well founded). I was and am equally grateful to each and every contributor not only for the many kind words about my work but, more, for the seriousness and depth with which they critically engaged it and, most of all, for the many and diverse directions in which they have developed it. As I read through the manuscript, what I saw unfold was a virtual kaleidoscope of approaches, themes, and basic concerns in which my own were clearly recognizable but raised to higher and more expansive levels—in them, my own thought, I felt, had been multiplied “aufgehoben,” but in the best-possible sense of this term. For me, realizing this was a genuinely singular experience for which I will be forever grateful to all involved in this project.

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As I mentioned, I’ve had some experience of my own with such projects. The very idea of a “Festschrift” is a peculiarly German enterprise that seems to have begun sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Basically, it was intended to be a celebration (hence “Fest”) taking the form of a gathering of written works in a single volume honoring some important event in the life of the honoree, often reaching a significant age or, in the present case, retirement. (The idea of a “Festschrift” is often paired with that of a “Denkschrift,” the difference being that the honoree of the former is still living, while that of the latter is deceased—and I again thank the timely dedication and industry of Elias and Rob for making sure that this volume is indeed a Festschrift!) I also wish to complement the courage of the publication editor of this work for suggesting to the volume editors that they offer me the opportunity of contributing to this project, for this can be a minefield, given the difficulties involved in rejecting something the honoree has submitted on invitation. Three notable pitfalls (and I’ve witnessed all three cases) are when the responding party undertakes to answer, often in detail, criticisms leveled by contributors against her or his work; when the submission is a new essay-length work, the honoree thereby becoming yet another contributor; and when the respondent attempts some description or apologia for the overall course and significance of her or his work, in effect, a preemptive self-interpretation. I assure the reader that I’ve no intention of engaging in any of these pitfalls, so I hope that, by this point, the editors are breathing a sigh of relief. I’ll limit my own response to two points. First, while I sensed that, in their introduction, Elias and Rob seemed a bit apologetic (or at least sensitive) to the variety of approaches deployed and themes explored by the various contributions to the volume, I want to assure them that this diversity is exactly as it should be, since it reflects not only my own diverse interests over the years but the approach I’ve always adopted toward the German Idealists, especially Hegel. Those who’ve followed my work or attended my seminars will already realize that my “version” of Hegel has always been a porous one that attended not only to the “unity of differences” but, as well, to the “differences” (and the corresponding “others”) which the unity-obsessed thrust of Hegel’s dialectical procedure left behind but which continued as fully functioning “outside the system.” So I see the diversity of theme and approach of these collected essays as a quite accurate reflection of my own critical reading of Hegel and his systemaniac predecessors that requires no apology whatsoever. Second, some of my students and colleagues (probably over a spirituous beverage) have heard me refer to my own philosophical stance as a sort of “halfassed Kantianism.” I’ve sometimes pulled this phrase out in response to being too quickly labeled a “Hegelian.” In fact, though I wouldn’t readily ascribe to my colleague Eckhart Förster’s bold claim that “philosophy proper” began with Kant and ended with Hegel, I would admit that I’ve always felt that Kant did provide the indispensable foundations for any productive subsequent philosophical activity and would also agree that Hegel was one, but only one, possible way to build on these foundations. Somehow, it always seemed to me that the proper philosophical stance for pursuing philosophy in any serious and rigorous way must lie somewhere

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between Kant’s dichotomous finitism and Hegel’s unitary and organic wholism, but without the super-transcendentalism of Fichte or the mystical-tinged forays of Schelling into system-construction. My best shot at developing such a view was my What Is Philosophy: Embodiment, Signification, Ideality (2014), a stance that could be fairly regarded as neither even Neo-Kantian nor Hegelian (though certainly with liberal borrowings and considerable inspiration from both). I’ve now come to think that the view I merely outlined in that work was presented at such a schematic level of abstraction that it was difficult for a reader to assess it without also seeing it “at work” in more concrete contexts. Since my retirement two years ago, I’ve returned to a theme that has been a lifelong passion and in which I’ve been continuously and actively involved: the creation, performance, experience, and “meaning” of music. This has involved a deep dive into the sometimes arcane literature of musicology, the “philosophy of music” (especially the writings of Schoenberg and Adorno), some aspects of ethnomusicology, and other themes that spread out rhizomically from these. I’ve been quite encouraged to find that some of the ideas presented in What Is Philosophy? (especially Chap. 11, “Philosophy and Its ‘Others’”) serve quite well as a framework for organizing a good deal of this very diverse material and may eventually offer a more concrete example of how the general approach outlined in that piece works in practice. In any event, I once again sincerely thank the editors and all the contributors to this volume, wish them all success in both expanding and deepening their own philosophical insights, and hope to meet and greet them again in person on down that broad highway marked “Sapere Aude.”

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PHILOSOPHY AND THEIR OTHERS Elias Kifon Bongmba and Robert Manzinger

This book invites readers to engage in multidisciplinary studies of philosophy as a celebration of Jere Surber, philosophy professor at the University of Denver, where he taught philosophy and influenced many of the contributors in this book. This is not the first time that philosophy and its others are part of a title. William Desmond used that phrase for his 1990 book and explored brilliantly different “ways of being and Mind.”1 Desmond’s excellent work was offered to argue that philosophy needed a new approach to relate to other communities of discourse as it addresses significant questions from the philosophical perspective. We use the term others in a slightly different and “loose” way to refer to the realms of discourse which we bring together into a conversation driven by aspects of the philosophies of Jere Paul Surber, Hegel, and Kant to speak to freedom, an idea that runs through many of the essays in the book. Our goal is to build a critical dialogical engagement on a range of issues such as religion, the arts, culture, and contemporary politics, practices which express dimensions of freedom of which Hegel and Kant were some of the best exemplars. We use the term freedom loosely in our titles, and Hegelian and Kantian freedom liberally, in many ways refraining from the technical philosophical engagement of freedom as a systematic category imbedded in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. We do this because the multidisciplinary essays we present are an intellectual exercise of freedom on the part of each contributor who was invited to participate but were not constrained as to what they could write. Our colleagues understood our goals and the result is a text that reflects the deployment of intellectual freedom to assess topics and advance ideas that reflect the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Our goal is limited in two ways. First, we invite readers to engage in an interdisciplinary reflection and analysis that is driven by some of the themes we learned from Surber, but we do so mainly through a limited critical engagement with Kant and Hegel and other philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas. We do this to showcase a Kantian and Hegelian freedom to think on our terms and expand on what we have learned from Surber; an interdisciplinary philosophical praxis that engages Kant and Hegel by reflecting on themes that reflect contemporary philosophical and ethical questions. In doing this we go beyond idealism to

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explore the modes of freedom addressed in a broader philosophical landscape that reflects questions raised in continental philosophy in the late twentieth century, even if our inspiration comes from Kant and Hegel as mediated in the teaching and scholarship of Surber. From this perspective our conversation arguably reflects a strand of liberalism which might be slipping away from contemporary democratic discourses and practice. We see our task as extending an invitation to readers to see in Kant, Hegel, and Surber what Peter Hodgson once called “shades of freedom.”2 Charles Taylor in two studies has argued convincingly that Hegel’s commitment to freedom and society was grounded in the notion of Sittlicheit.3 Hegel stressed community, but did not overshadow freedom which he considered to be the substance of Spirit, a self-relating agent.4 For many scholars, Kant and Hegel prioritized and emphasized human agency in thought and action. Second, this book addresses selected themes in modern philosophy, ethics, social thought, and German idealism, especially the recasting of the language and the practice of philosophy and theology as a rigorous grounding of ideas which have profound implications for the individual and communal quest for wellbeing. If we stray here by introducing broad interdisciplinary themes from different cultures, we do that to highlight the idea and practice of freedom as we have learned from Kant, Hegel, and Surber who all prioritized freedom in their philosophy. The essays in this book explore aspects of their work that unveil freedom and diversity. Each contributor focuses on a theme or topic he or she has chosen, and uses that theme to explore an aspect of philosophy such as freedom, the hindrance to freedom, and what freedom could look like. The essays also explore different topics and practices, highlighting the commitment to freedom from Kant, Hegel, Surber, and Mandela. The construction and organization in the book are intentional because we did not set out to build a mini system, but offer targeted insights that begin with Surber and go back to Hegel and Kant. Our goal is to invite readers to imagine community and the practice of freedom in these essays from an interdisciplinary perspective. The only thing that is new to this philosophical chain here is Surber because the philosophical connection between Hegel and Kant is established philosophical practice for many of the contributors. In many ways we follow Terry Pinkard who invited readers to “see Hegel’s theory as Hegel himself did, both as a continuation of the Kantian categorical-explanatory program and as a genuine plausible alternative to Kantianism.”5 The contributors to this book do so in different ways. First, they offer critical reflection on interdisciplinary philosophical ideas that begin with a reflection on Surber and his relationship to Hegel and Kant. Second, contributors also engage the texts of Kant and Hegel to articulate their own philosophical thought and practice on issues that address our being in the world, if we can borrow a Heideggerian expression.6 One could argue that in so doing we run the risk of “shortchanging” the philosophical and linguistic style of Kant and Hegel. We do not believe that this is the case. The essays in this book show the philosophical connections to Hegel, Kant, and Surber on subjects like idealism, freedom, politics, culture, and art. Our collaborators also examine contemporary questions in ways that open room for thought on questions of freedom and social existence.

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In doing so, we think we offer readers today an invitation to revisit Kant and Hegel to explore not only German idealism per se, but to highlight the scope of idealism and its ethical implications for dealing with some of the modern hegemonic discourses (perhaps inspired by Hegel, for instance, in his views of Africa). For example, in Southern Africa, where for hundreds of years, freedom was a white value and experience, a worldview that was countered by locals, especially leaders like Nelson Mandela who rejected the negative dialectics of existence that pitted white against Black in favor of a genuine human community where individual and social existence is predicated on equality. In addition, what distinguishes this book from other philosophical explorations of idealism is the fact that while grounding our arguments in German idealism and philosophy, we deploy the theoretical insights of that intellectual movement to examine questions and practices that foster or inhibit human experience in community. We build on the scholarship of Surber by offering diverse and substantial analysis of themes that call for new investigations that reflect selected questions of our time. Second, the themes we address in this book are only part of a limited conversation; the limitation here is the philosophical inspiration and aspirations derived from the scholarship of Jere Surber of the University of Denver. Surber’s research and teaching in a doctoral program that encompassed philosophy, ethics, theology, and critical social engagement invited his students to embrace philosophy as a world of thought and praxis grounded in freedom that one should inhabit. More importantly, he encouraged his students to pursue philosophy and its rational and critical tools for constructive engagement with the “big” questions that have shaped human and social thought. Philosophy, freedom, language, and its others are an exercise of freedom, and the critical essays which our colleagues present are grounded in the basic notion that philosophy invites thinkers to share in the quest for human freedom and explore the meaning of being in the world with other disciplines, even if philosophy’s mode of discourse tends to be specialized. From the beginning of the project, we invited our colleagues to think philosophically and speak to a world that yearns for reason and critical reflection by exploring specific philosophical themes before articulating their own propositions and critical positioning. The result is a book that offers an interdisciplinary dialogue on philosophical ideas, one that we believe our intellectually multifaceted honoree would appreciate. The essays reflect and relate to modern and contemporary continental thought (German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, poststructuralism, speculative realism); critical theory, philosophy of culture; philosophy of language, semiotics; contemporary continental thought on religion and theology; aesthetics, philosophy of art; philosophy and popular culture (literature, film, and video games); history of philosophy; and aspects of contemporary global philosophy. We have not covered as many of these themes as we would have liked to do, but readers will find a philosophical engagement on crucial issues of philosophy that reflect the author’s research and philosophical concerns. We present this book knowing that we have not addressed many questions such as gender, sexuality, family, and health, to name only a few. We have focused on areas that formed part

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of the philosophical engagement pursued by Surber but since we were interested in doing a book that reflects his interdisciplinarity in philosophy, our modus operandi was freedom (Kantian and Hegelian) and each contributor was given the latitude to engage in the art of reason and to focus on a philosophical idea of his or her own choice. The result is a set of studies which reflect the shared interests of the contributors and the honoree, but more importantly, these studies seek to articulate philosophical ideas and ideals that have resonance for the times in which we live. We note that the essays in some ways reflect the linguistic turn to philosophy in the continental tradition, but our intention was not to focus on language and philosophy, but rather to engage in thought and the practice of reason that demonstrates the relationship between philosophy and other areas of intellectual and public life. The essays therefore offer interdisciplinary perspectives that reflect the interests of Jere Surber as a philosopher, but bring other cultural and political dimensions that shape contemporary politics, for example. In addition, we are delighted to have a contribution that focuses on art to demonstrate Surber’s interest in the arts and music. He is proficient in a number of musical instruments and is equally comfortable at a symphony or driving down the road in his truck listening to the Grateful Dead; high culture and popular culture interest pervade his activities, whether it is visiting a museum or enjoying an afternoon at a Rockies or Broncos game. During his long tenure at the University of Denver, doctoral students were well acquainted with arguing philosophy with the aid of libations in Professor Surber’s “back cabin” study, or going into his house to listen to music in front of the massive Klipsch speakers, or watching movies, all the while he was displaying yet another talent for all of us, his expertise as a chef. Our focus on philosophy and its others reminds us that what struck us about Surber’s life and academic interests were not only the diversity of his ideas, but the deployment of reason to focus at various points of intersection: Philosophy and Religion; Philosophy and Popular Culture; Philosophy and Art or Music. We thus worked with our colleagues knowing that they will write their essays on an area of their own interest and where possible, relate it to either an idea or a text of Surber’s, as part of a critical dialogue, knowing that some of their interests and arguments may not necessarily address Surber’s work or align with his own philosophical perspective. In the end, we were pleased with the twelve papers included in this volume, joking to ourselves that from a religious perspective, while some consider twelve the number that stands for perfection, it is also the number of Jesus’ disciples, which to us was an irony because our first impression of Jere was that unlike some graduate professors and programs, he paid attention to his students, but allowed them to cultivate their own philosophy and mode of argumentation. Therefore, if anything reflects a common approach it is the fact that Surber’s students engaged in this dialogue to appreciate the philosophical journey which they began with Surber, but also demonstrate their own groundings in the Gesteswissenschaften as the broad philosophical tool and place from which they continue to engage in a philosophical and social praxis that reflects their quest for wisdom and justice in our world. In this aspect for our colleagues, Surber is like Nietzsche’s Zarusthustra; he desires friends, not followers.

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While this book is not an exegesis of Surber’s philosophy, we note that in his latest book, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality,7 Surber utilizes a term, Philosophy and Its Others. He talks about philosophy, art, and religion as being contingent discourses, each having its own standards of rationality. But emerging everywhere are the intersections, the points of contact of one discipline with another, the desire not to remain encapsulated in one area, but to branch out to others. Surber in this work unpacks the ways in which philosophy as a discipline and a mode of critical inquiry intersect with its Others in a dialogical engagement on the big questions of life. We think that this existence grounds and expands philosophy’s capacity to provide conceptual and theoretical anchorage for thought, reflection, and praxis. The research and reflection of our colleagues fall in two broad categories: Philosophy and Language, and Philosophy’s Others. We do not want readers to see this as a hard division because the language of philosophy which dominates the book also shapes the critical reflection and rigorous questionings that provide navigation tools for the appropriation and exploration of other realms of discourse and practices which we describe as the others of philosophy. In what follows we outline briefly the arguments of this book. The book begins with several essays that focus on Philosophy’s significant other that shapes the relationship to others, specifically German Idealism, the subject of four essays. Surber’s doctoral dissertation was on the problem of language in German Idealism and, in particular, Hegel. He has maintained an interest in it ever since. Moreover, Frank Schalow reminds us that Jere Surber was among the first of his contemporaries to address “the beginnings of the linguistic turn” that is found in German Idealism. In the first essay, “From Reason to Freedom,” William Maker starts with Surber’s book on Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy,8 in which Surber shows how Fichte contributed to the modernist project of demonstrating the interdependence of reason and autonomy. This interconnection involves their linkage as interrelated and interdependent forms of self-determination. Reason may only claim to challenge heteronomous determination insofar as reason can demonstrate its capacity for self-determination. Both truth and freedom must embody self-determination, since we can know something when we can comprehend it independently of any extraneous determinations. Freedom involves acting without inappropriate interference. The German idealists took on the challenge of articulating the nature of self-determination. Hegel’s move beyond Fichte involved demonstrating that the notion of subjectivity which philosophers since Descartes had taken for granted as foundational must be abandoned. He effects this abandonment through his Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 which traces consciousness to its ultimate self-sublation in the culminating chapter: absolute knowing. In expounding Hegel, Maker seeks to “avoid dogmatism on the one hand without succumbing to the bottomless worm hole of metacritiques on the other.” Knowing by a conscious subject requires demonstrating the correspondence of knowledge and object. Maker, like Stephen Houlgate whose essay comes later, highlights

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what Hegel calls a presuppositionless science, that is one that presupposes there is no foundation in the beginning, such that “we may presuppose nothing.” Hegel shows that this can only be effected when consciousness stands within and without itself, a move required to show that its subjective knowledge of the object actually corresponds to it as is in objectivity, beyond or independent of consciousness, thus certifying conscious subjectivity as foundational for philosophy and requires its self-immolation as a determinate entity. This provides the beginning point of the Science of Logic as the consideration of indeterminate immediacy. Hegel’s system subsequently considers the nature of determinate determinacy, in the philosophy of nature, and the nature of human freedom, our capacity for self-determination in the philosophy of spirit. The next two essays involve a response to Hegel’s idea of the “speculative sentence.” Jere Surber, Frank Schalow writes, was one of the “first of his contemporaries” to address the linguistic turn that began to emerge prior to the rise of German idealism in the nineteenth century, in his 1975 essay, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence.”9 Surber’s early writing on Hegel’s der Speculative Satz, translated as either the speculative proposition or the speculative sentence, has influenced two of our contributors. Hegel describes it in the Preface to his Phenomenology, where he writes: “The general nature of the judgment or proposition, which involves the distinction of Subject and Predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and the proposition of identity which contains the former becomes the counter thrust against that subject predicate relationship.”10 Hegel uses a musical metaphor to suggest that the relationship between subject and predicate, when viewed speculatively, is not merely how they each have their own separate and distinct identity, which is the traditional view, but that the “speculative proposition” brings to light a musical harmony of rhythm and meter between the two in a dialectical process such that “a unity in which what’s accentuated keeps fading away.”11 This relationship is one that Surber, following Hegel, succinctly describes as “dialectical identity in difference” (WP, 230). In his essay “Hegel’s Idea of the Speculative Sentence” Stephen Houlgate examines Surber’s interpretation of Hegel’s idea, in particular in his 1975 essay on the speculative sentence but also in What Is Philosophy? As Houlgate explains, Surber understands the speculative sentence described by Hegel to be one that articulates the “dialectical” character of the subject. This sentence does so, because it does not simply attribute a predicate to a fixed subject, but rather discloses the nature of the subject in the movement of predication itself. In the process, Surber claims, the sentence reveals that the conscious subject, like the grammatical subject, is not just a fixed entity, but exists and emerges in and through the utterances of language. After examining Surber’s “lucid account” of Hegel’s speculative sentence, Houlgate notes that his own understanding of Hegel differs from Surber’s in two significant ways. First, for Houlgate, the guiding imperative behind Hegel’s philosophy is that it should avoid taking anything for granted about thought or being—that it should be systematically presuppositionless. For Surber, by contrast—especially in his more recent work—Hegel’s thought is very far from

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being “presuppositionless.” In particular, he thinks that Hegel’s concept of the speculative sentence—for all its merits—presupposes a conception of identity that hides from view the necessarily “multiple” trajectories implicit in any proposition. Second, for Surber, speculative sentences do not constitute “a distinct class of sentences” in contrast to “others which cannot be so characterized,” but they are ordinary subject-predicate sentences whose dialectical, speculative character is brought out by philosophical reflection. For Houlgate, by contrast, there is a clear logical difference between a speculative sentence and an ordinary judgment. In the judgment, Houlgate contends, the subject and predicate are conceived as essentially distinct from one another, whereas in the speculative sentence the subject emerges in and through the sentence itself (in a manner similar to that described by Surber). In the second half of his essay, Houlgate explores this logical difference in more detail. He then concludes the essay by emphasizing that his understanding of the speculative sentence, though subtly different from Surber’s, is deeply indebted to the account of the sentence that he first encountered in Surber’s work. The third essay, and the second on the speculative sentence, is Jeffrey Reid’s, “An Onto-grammatical Reading of Lordship and Bondage.” Hegel explains his apparently tortured logos in grammatical terms by espousing the speculative sentence or proposition. The language of the Phenomenology of Spirit does not partake in the “usual attitude toward knowing” but adopts a form of discourse whereby “we learn by experience that we meant something other than what we meant to mean.” The problem of comprehension arises, explains Hegel, because the speculative proposition uses the grammatical form of common understanding, whereby the subject of the sentence is related to a predicate through the copula (the verb “to be”). However, it does so in a way where “the normal subject-predicate relation no longer obtains.” In sum, Hegel’s speculative proposition (Satz) involves comprehending the grammatical subject as positing itself (sich setzen) in the predicate, in such a way that Subjekt must be comprehended not only grammatically but psychically, as an expression of selfhood that invests itself ontologically and meaningfully into the predicate. This latter, now informed by the onto-grammatical subject, can then be seen to rebound, as a “counter-thrust,” on the subject, which now becomes a predicate. In this way, the usual subject-predicate roles have been subverted and reversed. The copula of the speculative proposition consequently becomes the lively arena of dialogical ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) between subject and predicate, where what appeared as the sign of exclusive identity (“is”) now encounters and admits difference, in such a way that “meter and accent” produce a “floating center of rhythm,” writes Hegel in the Preface, using a musical metaphor. Strangely perhaps, the “speculative proposition” passage of the Preface has never been read as generally informing the book in which it appears. Reading the Phenomenology onto-grammatically means interpreting its constitutive forms of consciousness as grammatical iterations of the speculative proposition, where the subject-object relations can be read as dialogical encounters between subject and predicate, where the predicate “talks back,” creating a

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discursive space of hermeneutical ambiguity and openness, at play in the copula. Reid’s essay begins with a brief presentation of Hegel’s general theory of language, as it pertains to the distinction between the linguistic sign (Zeichen) and the word (Wort), drawn from his later writings, before applying these grammatical terms to the ontological reading of the speculative sentence. Finally, Reid puts its dialogical insights into practice, examining how the onto-grammatical reading of the speculative sentence plays out in the Phenomenology’s famous “master-slave” dialectic. The fourth essay of the book is Jared Nieft’s “Remembering the Future: Plato’s Meno and the Forgotten Child of Philosophy.” Nieft begins with Plato and ends remembering the future of Hegel’s “Master-Slave” relationship, in order to argue that the problem of slavery is Western philosophy’s unasked question in Socrates’ elenchus of Meno. The dialogue of the Meno is ostensibly about the question, “what is virtue,” even though it arrives at no conclusions. The real question has to do with slavery, and that the “Cave” is “not merely allegorical but alludes to the historical mines of Laurion which Athens exploited through the pervasive use of slave labor.” This essay shows that Meno’s slave attendant, who appears midway through the dialogue and participates in a demonstration, devised and orchestrated by Socrates, is the physical manifestation and embodiment of the question that Socrates must ask but cannot ask. The traditional reading of the Meno is that Socrates demonstrates the doctrine of recollection, that the real knowledge of absolute truth resides in everyone, and is not learned but remembered. Socrates questions Meno, using “Meno’s boy,” a slave, as one who is commanded to appear and prove Socrates’ point, only it is Socrates who is confronted with the truth that the boy is not property, but a person who can recollect truth. Thus, the boy is a person and not a slave, a “forgotten child” and not a doorknob. Yet even philosophers rely on the labor of others in order to pay for the time to philosophize, so the question of the slave boy cannot be asked by Socrates. The paper further argues that this structural ambivalence is not unique to the Meno but is an underlying possible unavoidable, aporetic feature of Western philosophy. As for the forgotten child, “he is still coming,” Nieft concludes, in a quasi-Messianic ending. In the fifth essay, we return to German Idealism, but this time to Immanuel Kant and the concern for the origin of language in German idealism, and whether an antecedent could be found in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy; this was a subsidiary topic, both in some of Jere Surber’s classes (of which Frank Schalow was a student) and his research. In his essay, “Freedom and the Linguistic Turn in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” Schalow addresses this possibility. He responds to Surber’s challenge by considering whether an embryonic element of language in fact arises in Kant’s examination of the sensus communis, that is, in the act of communication required for aesthetic experience. In his essay, Schalow examines the role that language plays not in signifying objects for cognition, but also as a practice or activity in which human beings engage in their formation of a community. The concern for language, however, is not restricted to the Critique of Judgment. Indeed, the establishment of this

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“practical” dimension of language has implications for cultivating other forms of expression that are implicit, yet nevertheless crucial, to the deployment of Kant’s Critical philosophy as a whole, including such esoteric exercises as “schematizing” the categories of human cognition. Once the element of communicability is uncovered, an avenue is cleared to reopen the question of language throughout Kant’s Critical philosophy, most notably in his “revolutionary” work, the Critique of Pure Reason. This “linguistic” element of Kant’s philosophy yields possibilities for characterizing language as “connotative,” that is, as engendering meaning through the use of symbolic expressions and other patterns of signification (e.g., the ideas of reason), as well as through the strictly “denotative” role of determining objects. The basic thrust of Schalow’s essay, then, is to show how Kant’s celebrated “transcendental turn” implies, and ultimately necessitates, a “linguistic turn,” and that this is another side of the question of language that Jere Surber unfolds in centering his research on the roots of German Idealism.12 In this way, Schalow offers another perspective on whether the germ of a linguistic turn begins to emerge prior to the rise of German idealism in the nineteenth century, a controversy that Jere Surber was among the first of his contemporaries to address. William Anderson, a scholar in the analytic tradition, entitled his essay “Jere Surber and Saul Kripke on A posteriori Necessity.” This essay discusses and critically evaluates two entirely different interpretations of a paradox said to confront the concept of an a posteriori logical necessity. First, Anderson cites Jere Surber’s view that at least two “judgments” representing instances of a posteriori necessities confront a paradox. Anderson indicates this is intended by Surber to be the kind of paradox W. V. Quine calls a “veridical” paradox. This means that the representing statement confronts a genuine inconsistency and so calls for a revision in our conception of what constitutes the very notion of an a posteriori necessity. Anderson attempts to show first that Surber’s account of the paradox he claims to confront, and to offer a response, is due to the mischaracterization of a presupposition as a self-contradiction. His view, that the paradox confronted is veridical and thus is what forces us to accept his purported instances of statements contingently true but necessarily false when denied, is seen as fallacious due to this mischaracterization. Saul Kripke, on the other hand, takes the concept of an a posteriori necessity to be an apparent inconsistency only, and so this concept manifests a paradox Quine refers to as a “falsidical” paradox. Kripke’s example of such a statement is purportedly one whose epistemic character is indeed as an a posteriori truth. But it is likewise to be a statement whose modality as a necessity is known only upon subsequent reflection. Kripke maintains that the modality of logical (metaphysical) necessity has been, traditionally, wrongly identified with the different epistemic concept of an a priori statement. But if we distinguish how we come to learn a posteriori that a logically necessary statement is actually true from the knowledge we acquire in getting to recognize the modality of its truth value, knowledge we gain a priori, the purported veridical paradox mistakenly associated with an a posteriori necessary statement is seen to be only falsidical instead. Kripke calls this particular misapprehension “the illusion of contingency.”

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Anderson claims that Kripke’s “illusion of contingency” argument fails to show that the paradox of an a posteriori necessity is merely a falsidical paradox and thus not a barrier standing in the way of embracing statements having the intended modal and epistemic identity. In the end, Anderson points out that the concept of an a posteriori necessity is what can be called a “limiting instance” of an a posteriori truth. But that mathematical characterization just amounts to saying what can be said equally by the observation that logically necessary truths are exceptions to statements that (genuinely) enjoy the epistemic character of an a posteriori truth. Gary John Percesepe provides a cultural study as one of Philosophy’s others in his essay, “Guy Debord, Trump and the State of the Spectacle.” Percesepe advances Debord’s 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, as a prophetic reading in France of what has transpired in Western democratic capitalism, and personified most recently in the United States by President Donald Trump. Debord’s book advances 221 theses of how society expresses its domination as a spectacle and we are merely passive spectators. In ways akin to Marshall McLuhan, Debord talks about “the integrated power of the spectacle” which today people might say is the “media,” a force that mystifies its origins, and lacks a clear ideology. Percesepe also introduces Jean Baudrillard, and his simulacra and analysis of signs, as well as Karl Marx and twentieth-century Marxists like Georg Lukacs to point out our current social fragmentation, alienation, and isolation. But it is the “spectacle” that is Percesepe’s focus, and spectacle refers to a number of social and economic forces, but “specifically how images, representations and a world reduced to entertainment prevent authentic life from coming into being.” In short, he says, “substitute Feuerbach’s illusion for Debord’s spectacle,” and Marx’s commodity for Debord’s images, as images make us want to forget. Debord’s “integrated spectacle” also includes, among other things, generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies, and a world without memory, where one image flows into the next. All of this is presaged in George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, and summarized in Percesepes’s succinctly insightful comment, “Big Brother is not watching you; Big Brother is You Watching.” We are a country of watchers, whether it be Fox News, or CNN, it doesn’t matter; we are the supporters, the Greek chorus, while Donald Trump is the tragic, persecuted, self-staged victim. There is no longer any truth, but arguments and lies going around in circles; there are no more scandals, because we can no longer remember last week’s lies. We are seduced into being spectators, convinced we have no power, and so only continue “to feed the daily beast,” knowing more about Q-Anon than “members of the local school board.” Capitalism is essentially racist, says Harvard philosopher Michael Sandler; and progressives are clueless if they think elitist capitalism can be reformed. However, in the end, philosophy does offer forms of resistance, as Percesepe here cites Jere Surber. The important thing to do is not to watch, but to act, and work for the common good. The next essay by Andreas Dorner and Ludgera Vogt is on German media and aesthetics, “The Cultural Dimensions of Breaking News: Aesthetics and Extreme Events,” and it presents an ordered contrast to Perscesepe’s use of the Frenchman

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Debord’s theory to make sense of the American president Donald Trump and his freewheeling “Twitter” style and chaos creating spectacle. Dorner and Vogt begin with Jere Surber’s book, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies,13 to raise the difficult question of defining culture, one in which as early as 1952, Alfred Kroebler and Clyde Kluckohn’s paper lists 162 distinct definitions of culture. Surber connects cultural dimensions of human existence with criticism, and the authors examine the role of culture or, more precisely, the role of aesthetics in news formats within the context of an empirical research project on breaking news on German television. Doerner and Vogt focus on how aesthetic design helps to render extreme events within a society comprehensible and processable for the public. Aesthetics, they suppose, are a means of coping with extreme events. The Czech drawing theorist Jan Mukarovsky distinguishes between the everyday aesthetic and art by describing both their pragmatic and aesthetic functions, and art is where the latter function predominates; furthermore, “beyond the realm of art” there is also the perspective of the viewer in “the act of reception.” Doerner and Vogt introduce some theoretical considerations following German thinkers Helmut Plessner and Hans-Georg Soeffner, beginning with the starting point of Helmuth Plessner’s “eccentric positionality,” as humans are both biological (corporeal) and cultural beings. This eccentrically positioned human being faces a fundamental insecurity in existence and is in need of the grounding function of aesthetics. Thus, the aesthetics of special news programs grounds insecure people in the wake of sudden occurrences, such as “terrorist attacks, rampages and serious violent crimes; major accidents and (natural) disasters as well as extreme weather; war and civil war situations, but also political and economic crises,” though seldom used for elections (Sorry Donald). Stage sets, format designs of the images, color schemes, formal language, music, and chroma keying (i.e., The Reichstag symbolizing political power and seriousness) are illustrated in three case studies to visually convey a feeling of security and create order out of disorder. The essay concludes with a brief summary on the relevance of aesthetics in news communication. Miglena Dikova-Milanova’s essay, “Kant’s Language of the Sublime and Its Metacritique: On Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘The End,’” argues that Kant’s aesthetic concept of the awe-inspiring feeling of the sublime serves as a philosophical source for the assessment of the images and fear of death in these two contemporary novels. The text begins with an investigation into the Kantian concept of the sublime in both his critical systematic philosophy and his earlier essayistic writings. In his early pre-critical work, Kant establishes a close link between the terror of death and the sublime. The sublime in Kant’s systematic transcendental philosophy, among other things, points out our ability to overcome our fear of nature’s power and to discover the inherent human predestination to moral goals. One of the claims of this essay is that the evolution of Kant’s views on the sublime could be perceived as a result of the philosopher’s own linguistic quest, as the sublime functions as both a philosophical concept and an interplay of images

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and even short narratives. The rather inconsistent early Kantian attempts to give literary voice to the feeling and the drama of the sublime can be traced in the plots of modern and contemporary novels. However, Kant’s early attempts were not without critics in his own time, such as Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, as Dikova-Milanova uses Jere Surber’s text on Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German Idealism14 as a springboard to respond to their attacks; she reframes the philosophy of another Kantian contemporary, A. F. Bernhardi, to show the link between the philosophical and literary guises of the sublime through looking into the philosophy of language. Dikova-Milanova illustrates how the literary texts of DeLillo’s and Knausgaard’s novels rework, ironize, retell, and reinvent the Kantian concept and narratives of the sublime, as the experiences therein bring it to light. In White Noise (1984), Don DeLillo describes the increasing anxiety of Professor Jack Gladney and his obsessive fear of death. In fact, the title of the novel White Noise in the text is revealed as a synonym of “death.” In turn, in The End (2011), Knausgaard uses both the language of fiction and the style of the philosophical essay in order to describe not only his daily struggle with life’s circumstances, but also those of early and midtwentieth-century Europe. Knausgaard connects “the sublime in human nature”15 with the overwhelming collective feelings of fear of death and enthusiasm. The sublime is not a purely aesthetic category, but rather an intricate dynamic human interaction with the inner and outer world that reveals the hidden workings of thought and emotions in moments that transgress the known limits of reality. Shaw Smith’s essay, “Intersections: Memory and the Politics of Patrimony in Daniel Buren’s Deux Plateaux.” Daniel Buren’s Deux Plateaux (1985–6), an installation which created a grand controversy when it was first inaugurated in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, now faces a new challenge in the first decades of the new century. Its very existence was put into question by the French government under Chirac as well as by the artist himself. The government declared that its plan was to “tolerate rather than to destroy it” in 1986, but that policy has led to such a degraded site that even Buren was about to dismantle the piece (“vandalism by the state” as he called it). Fortunately, there have been some efforts to restore parts of it in 2008, but little serious analysis about the work, so Smith considers what has been done and expands on it. This essay posits the historical context of the Deux Plateaux, analyzes its function as an institutional critique, assesses aspects of its reception, and offers an alternative reading to its public criticism. In contrast to those who would criticize it as elitist, as well as in contrast to those who interpret it more formally and mathematically, this essay offers a “playful roaming” by analyzing the installation’s merits through a semiotic reading of the historical associations, its example of epistemological freedom, and its contemporary relevance and expectations for modern citizenship. Buren’s use of detournement, a diversion or turning aside, is used as a weapon against “the society of the spectacle,” as he offers the opportunity to reclaim public space and reconsider the possibilities of history. For the first time, the installation is shown to provide an accessible image of hope for individual freedom and collective responsibility through a new contingent

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approach to memory and history, using the semiotics of French film, the historical model of Michel Nuridsany (1993) and the mathematical model of Guy Lelong (2002), as well as the rhizome metaphor of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) framed by Umberto Eco’s theory of the limitations of interpretation (1992). This public act of remembering and forgetting both royalist imperatives as well as republican and revolutionary narratives is conditional by its very nature. These contingently evoked images of hope are based upon a symbolic, virtual grid of French Cartesian thinking represented in the variable Columns which roam from the evocations of the ancient stone alignments at Carnac to the dazzling aerial force of the Concorde in the Columns’ call to remember or else to be enslaved. While this essay focuses on one monument by one artist, Buren’s work, by its ironically ephemeral nature, evokes a whole range of French visual culture and empowers a new way of remembering and thinking about national patrimony with its very fuzzy borders. The final two essays look at ways that religion is at the intersection of some of Surber’s interests, as we begin with Robert Manzinger who discusses the function of humor in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript as the boundary area between reason and faith, between philosophy and religion. Kierkegaard and Hegel were reputed to have many differences, though this may not be the case: the principal difference was described as early as 1837 by S. K. and it is the subsuming of religion under the rubric of Philosophy, and the unwillingness of Hegel to transgress a boundary (Jenseits) beyond reason into faith. Jere Surber maintains the Kierkegaardian separation of philosophy and religion, but while Kierkegaard sees faith as being beyond the boundary of reason, Surber holds that philosophy is accountable to reason alone, describing religion as one of “philosophy’s others.” Kierkegaard sees humor as the highest form of reason, thereby a transition arena to faith in the religious stage. Kierkegaard’s Postscript is where he makes his most significant arguments on faith and reason, utilizing a pseudonym, Johannes Climacus (St. John of the Ladder), in order to portray a humorist, a philosopher, a person of reason, who understands the way to faith, but lacks the passion to pursue it. For Climacus, humor is poised on the boundary line between faith and reason, between the ethical stage and the religious stage, that is, Christianity. Humor is also the flip side of Kierkegaard’s final descriptor of authentic Christianity, that is, suffering; it is humor that can lead one through indirect communication to the doorway of faith, because humor is able to sympathize with those who are suffering and unable to move forward along the stages or spheres of life’s way. One of the major images or models of being a chaplain is that of a “wise fool,” a model that goes back to the Apostle Paul’s foolishness of the gospel (I Cor. 1:18–31), and to Desideirus Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. This model is one where humor is invoked to embrace our suffering and call us forward to reflect on the ethical possibilities of an illness or trauma, and also to hear about the sacred, consider faith, or borrow the faith of another. Many who enter the hospital regard themselves as having “no religious preference,” but who are pushed to boundary lines, limits, and even beyond the limits of reason in order to make sense of, and find, their peace, amidst the suffering of a loved one. The chaplain, one of the

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caretakers of faith in a hospital, can use humor as his or her incognito, that is, the person of faith is incapable of communicating religion directly, so it must be done indirectly through humor, as a mirror of the inner life, in the midst of the suffering outside of him or her. Humor and suffering seem to be strange bedfellows, but it is humor that calls people indirectly to that boundary line between reason and faith, and to the possibility of deciding for hope, life, or eternity. In the final essay, Elias Kifon Bongmba’s “Mandela’s Legal and Spiritual Politics,” Bongmba draws from Surber’s Philosophy of Culture as a background to his discussion of the notion of spiritual politics which he uses to refer to a social and political practice that has been shaped by religious ideals. He argues that Nelson Mandela grew up as a member of the Methodist Church of South Africa. In addition to his Xhasa traditions and beliefs, Christian mission ideals played an important role in his life and shaped his political vision of an inclusive, nonracial society for all the people of South Africa. These values formed the core beliefs and reason for Mandela’s long struggle against the apartheid regime for which he was imprisoned for twenty-seven years. When Mandela was released he continued his campaign for liberty and justice for all the people of South Africa and led the country to freedom. Mandela would promote the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which made significant recommendations for forgiveness which would lay the ground work for a thriving multiracial democracy in South Africa. Bongmba’s discussion is built on philosophical ideas articulated by Jacques Derrida as well as Edith Wyschogrod’s interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas. Postscript: Jere Surber’s good friend, Bill Maker, a Hegel scholar, and an enthusiastic participant in this project (the first essay in this book), passed away on November 10, 2021. Bill did not like labels, and so we hesitate to describe him as a Hegelian or Kantian scholar. But we will remember him as a colleague who sought to understand concepts and convinced that concepts can and should be organizing principles which frame the questions we pursue. We do not pursue them today to build systems, but we pursue them in the hope of imagining the many ways in which we could catch a glimpse of sittlichkeit as we seek to come to terms with those institutions notably family, civil society, and the concept and reality of the state which not only situate personal and social existence but offer the terrain, training, and testing of ethical life. Bill will be missed, but we know he has passed the baton to us. We express our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.

Notes 1 2 3

William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990). Peter Hogdson, Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See Charles Taylor, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Four years later, Tayler published Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1979). We are indebted to Paul Franco, “Hegel and Liberalism,” The Review of Politics, vol. 59, no. 4 (Autumn, 1997): 831–60, p. 833. 4 Robert B. Pippin, “Idealism and Agency in Kant and Hegel,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 88, no. 10 (October, 1991): 523–42. 5 Terry Pinkard, “Freedom and Social Categories in Hegel’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. XIVII, no. 2 (December, 1986): 209–32. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson, with a new Forward, Taylor Carman (New York: HarperPerenial, 2008). 7 Jere Surber, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality (Melbourne: Re. Press, 2014). Hereinafter, this book will be referenced as WP. 8 Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 9 Jere Paul Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” 210–30, Hegel-Studien, 10 (1975), pp. 210–15. 10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 38, Italics mine. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). 12 Surber, Language and German Idealism. 13 Jere Paul Surber, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 14 Jere Paul Surber (ed.), Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German Idealism (Amherst, NY: Humanities Press, 2001). 15 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6. The End, trans. Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett (New York: Harvill Secker, 2018), p. 682.

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Chapter 1 H E G E L : F R OM R E A S O N T O F R E E D OM William Maker

The noted fan of German Idealism, W. V. O. Quine, once joked that there are two kinds of people interested in philosophy: those interested in the history of philosophy and those interested in philosophy.1 This may recall the adage that those who are ignorant of the past may be doomed to repeat it, perhaps in farcical fashion. If Faulkner is correct in holding that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” then philosophy is a continuing, curiously ahistorical project in which we attempt to converse in the present with those from the past, keeping philosophy alive and thereby sustaining it as an ongoing engagement in the domain of reason.2 Among those of us involved in these sepulchral labors, Jere Surber’s work is exemplary in combining a forensically focused attention to textual and historical details with an eye toward disclosing their significance for contemporary concerns. Thus, in Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy, he summons Fichte to life, but not just as a somewhat sidelined, if not largely ignored, figure deserving of reassessment and reappraisal because of his importance for the history of linguistics alone.3 In addition, he presents a Fichte who provides insights into enduring concerns about the prospects for philosophy to fulfill its Kantian promise to legitimate reason as the ground and agency of human knowledge and freedom, and to thus secure philosophy’s rightful place on its throne as die Koenigen der Wissenschaften. As Herbert Marcuse made clear in Reason and Revolution, the German Idealists shared the modernist conviction that reason and the ultimate realization of autonomy as the fulfillment of human potential were inseparably linked.4 The Idealists saw that the connection between nous and autonomy was fundamental to philosophy owing to its ancient commitment to the imperative that human conduct should be guided by truth, not opinion, and that claims to truth must be demonstrated. Thus, the German Idealists’ goal was to provide a thorough accounting of how philosophically secured truth was inseparable from establishing the legitimate authority of autonomous reason to set forth the nature and conditions for rationally autonomous freedom. A crucial insight was that truth and freedom both involve a process of self-determination: we can know something as just what it is when we can comprehend it as it is independent of any

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extraneous determinations. Correlatively, human freedom involves the capacity to be who and what one is without unduly intrusive external interference. A decisive question then is how to establish the capacity of individual subjects to make such determinations about truth and about their own existence. How is the freedom of embodied beings acting in and upon a natural environment and in a social world with others more-or-less like themselves to be realized? The German Idealists also shared the conviction that critical reflection on the essential features of subjectivity could isolate and clarify the core component features of our shared humanness. More specifically, they believed that the philosophical project of self-reflection would reveal just what is found inherent in ourselves which could make self-rule possible. Put simplistically and in contemporary terms, if we are all programmed, wired up, in the same fashion, then we should all arrive at compatible decisions through the running of the program, that is, through the exercise of right reason, as the proper decision procedure. Kant, for example, believed that his philosophical articulation of the categorical imperative made perspicacious, clear, and accessible the decision procedure for human moral choices about action that lay inherent in us in being the rational beings that we are. Reflection on the conditions of our rationality and the conditions for self-rule bring us alike, according to Kant, to the categorical imperative as the benchmark principle for an ordered freedom.5 Concerns could be raised, and were so most forcefully later, by Nietzsche, regarding the extent to which our nature is in fact rational, and, even assuming that we are rational, whether the will as genuinely free could be constrained by moral law.6 Aware that as a philologist and philosopher he was caught up in being critical about the critical project (and pushed by his own commitment to the moral value of truth which he admitted finding dubious), Nietzsche challenged assumptions about our very capacity to make ourselves clear to ourselves, to “know ourselves,” as well as our ability to find epistemic, psychological, and moral stability in a world of becoming.7 Mentioning Nietzsche may seem to take us ahead of the story, but just the thoroughgoing skeptical critique of critique which he demanded was, as Surber indicates, already at issue in the post-Kantian milieu of Fichte’s time. In any case, it seemed that only if the idealists’ modernist project succeeded would it be then plausible to contend that the removal of the external constraints of given (and long-established and accepted) authority would lead not to anarchy and chaos, to a Hobbesian war of all against all where we find “… the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”8 but to a cooperative social harmony arising from our inherently shared principles and dispositions. Discovering and bringing to the surface the inner operating conditions for self-rule could vindicate shifting the locus of authority concerning truth and conduct from the constraints of the authority of tradition and traditional authorities to individual subjects, exorcising what Marx referred to as “the tradition of all the dead generations” which “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”9 So, philosophy’s proper and paramount task was to firmly establish and justify the right of humanity to shape the world according to proper ends. Attaining the ends of truth, beauty, and justice was to be explicated as the conditions of

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flourishing existence by being revealed as implicit in the most fundamentally shared characteristics of our humanity. Thus, the idealists saw their tasks as both theoretical and practical; the problem of knowledge extended into lived experience. As usual, the devil, and the disagreements, lay in the details, and in Language and German Idealism, Surber carefully escorts and guides us through the complex and cluttered workshop of Fichte’s forge, attending to both the process of his craft and its results. In what follows I will engage with some aspects of that account, not regarding the accuracy of his presentation of Fichte, but rather in terms of what I have sketched above as the philosophical issues at stake: can the right to individual self-determination be legitimated, and if so, how? I will do this from the perspective of what I take to be the substance of Hegel’s thinking about the vexatious difficulties that the project of accounting for the legitimate authority of rational freedom faces, how they may be addressed, and finally, how he believes the project should proceed and what it yields. What follows then is a sketch or outline of Hegel’s position on how science can be attained. I will begin with a consideration of the Phenomenology of Spirit of 180710 as a continuation and intensification of the critical project. The interpretation of the Phenomenology I will offer sees it as presenting Hegel’s analytic coming to terms with the critical project associated with Kant’s First Critique. My focus will fall initially on Hegel’s presentation in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of its subject matter: a critically reflective consciousness intent on giving an account of and justifying its ability to know.11 I will then consider what the outcome of consciousness’s project discloses about the critical endeavor and how that outcome provides the beginning of Hegel’s system.12 Most if not all theories about knowledge operate from what Hegel problematized in the Phenomenology as the structure of consciousness. As I read the Phenomenology, in particular in its designated role as the introduction to philosophical science, its major motivating concern is whether the modernist proponents of the epistemic and moral primacy of individual subjectivity had taken this notion for granted by uncritically assuming that subjective consciousness can legitimate its primacy.13 What would such a legitimation amount to? Just pursuing the issue of what critical justification requires opens the door to further concerns: While we agree on some commonplace features of subjective experience, can the operational faculties which presumably underlie them be revealed? And if these operations can be disclosed, can they be coherently accounted for? Can we accept without further ado, as a given, the commonplace understanding of subjectivity, the seemingly unassailable fact that we are conscious beings inhabiting and acting in a world of objects other than ourselves? So what is at stake is the transcendental question which Hegel felt his predecessors had either failed to raise or adequately addressed: Is knowing in the ordinary or usual sense, knowing by a subject of an object, definitive of knowing as such and can this be demonstrated? It seemed to Hegel that if knowing as defined by consciousness is in fact exclusively definitive of knowledge and capable of affording truth, then consciousness should be able to account for and demonstrate its capacity to know. Demonstrating that would provide the needed justification

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for the claim to the overriding authority of individual subjects to judge and act for themselves. For Hegel, this accounting constituted the essential and unavoidably preliminary subject matter of the critical project and it had yet to be adequately thought through. It must be given precedence over other concerns such as morality and art (as indeed Kant had seen) since only if the essential conditions for knowing the truth can be set forth first can we then be secure in our judgments about how to act or what constitutes beauty. We will come to see what just such a demonstration entails. So I read the Phenomenology and will present an overview of it below as devoted to thinking through the question as to whether consciousness can demonstrate its epistemic primacy, and thus legitimate the “natural assumption … in philosophy”14 of Hegel’s idealist predecessors, including Fichte, that philosophy must begin with the subject, in the sense, that is, of taking the oppositional structure of subjectivity as given and primal. If consciousness be seen to demonstrate its capacity to know, then their assumption (that knowledge as such is knowledge of an object by a subject) would be justified, and the business of scientific cognition proper could begin, now secure in the certainty that the way to truth has been established. The specter of radical Cartesian skepticism would be banished. But it may be, perhaps, that consciousness cannot ground itself when it undertakes the reflective endeavor of making its own knowing an object for itself. We cannot take this question as settled without begging the question and abandoning the critical project’s need to confront this worry about meta-criticism. If we do so we lapse into a corrosive dogmatic skepticism in which we appear to hold, inconsistently, to the finality of the conclusion that all claims to know are equivocal.15 This may lead to the existential scenario sketched by Hume at the conclusion of Book 1 of the Treatise, where he reflects on the fact that the discoveries of his investigation into the understanding led him to conclude that the very enterprise of the investigation of the understanding may be illegitimate, plunging him, at least momentarily, into “philosophical melancholy and delirium.”16 By raising this question in a meta-critical fashion, I believe Hegel anticipated, in some respects, the later poststructuralist, postmodernist, or deconstructive projects.17 As we will see, a crucial difference is that in his engagement with the issue, the outcome of critically investigating consciousness’s epistemic primacy will not be a sweeping skepticism which intimates the wholesale abandonment of the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science, but the clearing of a path to its possible realization. As Hegel lays it out in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, the basic structure of knowing by a conscious subject appears as follows. Being (and whatever else it is) is present to a conscious awareness as a determinate object, a Gegenstand. The object is always minimally and irreducibly distinct from awareness as something which is already determinate, even if only in the minimal sense simply as some entity distinct from the awareness of it, from consciousness itself. This bipolar, oppositional relationship of subject and object is sometimes referred to by Hegel as “the standpoint of consciousness.”18 In the knowing relationship which consciousness assumes to its object (as directly present in its field of awareness), words or signs, markers of some form or shape, may be attached to the object.

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Knowing as defined by consciousness consequently involves a correspondence relationship where demonstrable success, knowing the truth, involves displaying the correct presentation of the object, its representation, in its coincidence with that object just as it in fact exists independent of consciousness. (A reasonably straightforward representative instance of this conception of knowledge is offered by the so-called “picture theory of truth” which Wittgenstein laid out in the Tractatus.19) The crucial issue, as we shall see, is what state of affairs must come to pass in order for consciousness to demonstrate that it has attained the holy grail of correspondence. As Hegel sees it, the difficulty for consciousness consists in the fact that demonstrated correspondence requires that knowledge and object must be simultaneously identical and different. Identity is required to certify truth— difference in order to certify that the purported truth is objective. Why is this identity and difference required and what difficulties does it lead to?20 More specifically, the moment or aspect of identity is necessary in order to show that what the subject takes the object to be is in fact what it is in itself, just as it is independent of and apart from the knowing act. In terms of content, representation and what is presented in it need to be the same. If the representation differs from the presented object, truth has not been secured. (In ordinary experience we may think of this as instance where the subject has either unintentionally or willfully distorted its account of objectivity.) But consciousness must also validate that, epistemically, there is an enduring ontological difference between knowledge and the object. It cannot be shown that the purported knowledge is objectively true, knowledge of the object as it is in itself, as opposed to knowledge of it just as it appears to me, unless consciousness maintains and demonstrates, holds present, the difference between knowledge and object. And of course, the transcendental knower himself or herself (the conscious subject which Hegel presents as the Phenomenology’s subject matter, and which we observe undertaking the investigation) must stand in the same relationship of knowing to the object they are investigating. Otherwise we confront the dilemma that either the truth of the critical meta-knowledge being presented is dogmatically assumed, or an infinite regress of meta-investigations must ensue.21 There would appear to be no grounds, once the need for critique is manifested, that we assume critique itself is not in need of critical inspection. It seems to me that Fichte’s endeavor to secure a genuinely ultimate, and final beginning point is based, at least in part, on such concern: to avoid dogmatism on the one hand without succumbing to the bottomless worm hole of metacritiques on the other. One way to envision the deeply problematic character of beginning in this manner, with conscious knowing as paradigmatic and ostensibly definitive of knowing, is to engage in a thought experiment of considering what is needed for its validation, for a demonstration that it can in fact afford knowledge: demonstrating correspondence requires a mind or awareness which can be at one with its object and capable of fully grasping it as it is, while also remaining distinct from it and thus in a position to verify that what is present in objectivity corresponds to its notion of it. In short, such a mind or awareness must be at one and the same time capable of transcending itself while being with itself

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in otherness. Expressed in philosophically theological terms, the only mind seemingly capable of the epistemic certitude at stake would be something like a divine mind, more specifically an infinite creative mind at once omniscient, omnipotent, and infallible. For such a mind, as capable of creation ex nihilo, the willing act of bringing into being is coterminous with knowing the domain of objectivity it has brought forth by the act. For a divine creative mind, what it intentionally wills is just what is, as it is, period. An important contrast exists here with human, finite making. In this instance what we fashion may not correspond to what we originally intend because of a flaw in the plan, our lack of adequate skill to realize it in the material or owing to imperfections in the given material being formed. (As Robert Burns observed, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, Gang aft a-gley.”)22 In contrast to human fabrication, as created ex nihilo by an all perfect and all powerful being, the object has no residue of an already-given matter which has merely been imparted with form and thus there is no predetermined, irreducibly other matter lying beyond full transparent intelligibility. Nor, as possessed of all possible perfections, is there a chance for error on the part of the creator, either in the plan or its execution.23 Our human consciousness however is finite, bound as awareness of to an ineliminable, unbridgeable, distinction between itself and its object. Nonetheless, we can consider what would transpire with consciousness if such a state of affairs as outlined above were to be attained. Here I shall leap to what I see as the unavoidable outcome of consciousness’s project. This is reached according to Hegel, in “absolute knowing” as “the truth of every mode of consciousness” because “it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth.” And this “deduction” of the “concept of pure science” is the “truth” of “every mode of consciousness” in the Phenomenology. But just this attainment, he immediately observes, constitutes “liberation from the opposition of consciousness.”24 And, he importantly adds, “the opposition of consciousness … is known to be overcome.”25 Unlike a divine infinite mind which we can imagine as capable of still being at one with itself even in the otherness of its created objectivity, both inside and outside of itself, finite consciousness’s defining structure must remain oppositional. It is and only is what it is as always distinct from what it is aware of. Consequently, since consciousness can only succeed in grounding itself by having the simultaneous identity and difference of its knowledge and the object present to it, in attaining to this consciousness thereby transcends itself in the sense of violating or suspending the very “opposition of consciousness” which defines it as a determinate structure. As Hegel puts it in the Science of Logic, “pure science presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness.”26 In the logic he notes that “its beginning is made” with what has “come to be through mediation, a mediation which is also a sublating of itself.”27 As we have seen, the Phenomenology is just that self-sublating mediation since conscious can only demonstrate its capacity to know by transcending itself as consciousness. To paraphrase Wittgenstein from the end of the Tractatus, once we have climbed the ladder we can discard it and see things aright.28

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My account so far here of the outcome of the Phenomenology differs from most in that I regard the Phenomenology’s outcome in absolute knowing as the introduction to science not to be the enshrining of an absolute subject as the determinate foundational point for what ensues in the opening of systematic science in the Science of Logic. (In that traditional view, a determinate absolute subject determines the determinacies of the system.29) Rather, what the Phenomenology accomplishes as what Hegel calls the “presupposition” for a “presuppositionless science” is to clear the ground of the persistent notion that philosophical science can begin with some given foundational determinacy. The opening of logic as the “result of a preceding science”—the Phenomenology—is a “presupposition” but that same beginning “may not presuppose anything.”30 We might regard consciousness as the structure of presupposing since it always construes knowledge as of an already-determinate given. It presupposes that determinacy is found given and cannot be construed otherwise, thus precluding the prospect of autonomous selfdetermination. Every attempt by consciousness in the Phenomenology to show how it can attain knowledge of that given failed in that what it sequentially comes to know is not the object as what is but what it is for it, appearance.31 The knowledge of consciousness is apparent in the twofold sense that it is of things only as they appear for it, and because its mode of knowing heretofore appeared (was taken to be or presupposed) as paradigmatic and incorrigible. What I have discussed so far presents the outcome of the Phenomenology in negative terms. How does its outcome nonetheless also provide a beginning point for philosophical science? Since the Phenomenology stands as the introduction to the system of science, and since the system opens in logic, we need to turn there to find how things stand at this crucial juncture. In consciousness’s self-transcendence what was vitiated was the notion (or assumption) that philosophical science could begin with a determinate given and specifically with the structure of consciousness as oppositional. As legitimated, consciousness or an absolute subject, would be the determining determiner, the arche, for generating the subject matter of science. But as we have seen the legitimating moment of absolute knowing suspends consciousness as determining determiner. What remains then is what Hegel specifies in logic as its beginning, the “indeterminate immediate.”32 This residue of consciousness links directly to the Phenomenology as the introduction to science, because consciousness there construed what is as determinate, in virtue of being a given object, and as mediated, in virtue of being an object which is present for and known by a subject. Thus, what I have described as consciousness’s selftranscendence presents us with indeterminate immediacy. How does science proceed from this juncture? In the opening of the logic Hegel speaks of our making a “resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary” to take up what is there before us and to “propose to consider thought as such.”33 It seems plausible given what we have seen to regard the resolve as arbitrary because otherwise, there would be an implicit claim of a moment of necessity to our decision to go forward. That is, we would have to construe the decision to proceed as engendered or caused in some determinate fashion, rather than as a free, uncoerced choice. Insofar as the residue of the Phenomenology is just indeterminate

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immediacy, there is nothing there to compel further consideration.34 Furthermore, what the resolve also means is that we will not invest any determinacy in the indeterminate simply because it is an object of thought for us as finite, conscious beings: as something which we make present to ourselves. To err here would be to hold the indeterminate immediate as already fixed with determinate character because we have focused on it as present to us as conscious beings. So in this way the experience of the Phenomenology has provided us with, as it were, a negative method for proceeding in philosophical science. To proceed in the abjured fashion would be to introduce determination from without which would compromise the scientific character of the discourse. To proceed properly is just to attend to the distinguishing characteristics of indeterminate immediacy. Hegel believes that is possible for us to free ourselves from the predilection of assuming that our usual mode of cognition is the only one possible, and that we may succeed in philosophy of liberating ourselves from the habit of believing or automatically assuming this, at least when we are engaged in philosophical thought. (He explores the issue of how conscious beings inhabiting a world of objects navigate in and may transform that world through actions in order to be at home in it in the Encyclopedia.)35 To think the indeterminate immediate just in and as indeterminate, according to Hegel, is to think it is as being, as isness without any further specification or qualification whatsoever. Hegel describes this thinking as follows: In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to another; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outward. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from another.36

Having the nature then such that it is devoid of all identifying and distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, thinking being as such is indistinguishable from thinking nothing, or the thinking of being amounts to the thinking of the vanishing of a distinction between being and nothing. Pure being cannot be thought without our thinking being the thinking of nothing, which is no more determinately distinguishable from being than being initially is from nothing. Hegel states: “It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it ….Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.”37 Our consideration of the discovery that thinking undifferentiated, indeterminate being moves us to the thinking of nothing, reveals that thinking indeterminate immediacy is the thinking of a vanishing distinction between being and nothing. It is the thinking of becoming “as this determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing.”38 Since we can’t think being without nothing nor nothing without being we come upon their inseparability as the disappearance of the distinction between them, becoming.39 As logic moves forward we can describe it as the process of thought engaging in its self-determination as a development in which antecedent determinations

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require thought’s moving forward to their others just in order to sustain these antecedent determinations in and as determinate. Insofar as this endeavor succeeds, logic would circumscribe the nature of pure or autonomous reason. Completing that process of the conceptual self-determination of thought then requires thought to consider the nature of a determinacy which, unlike its own, is not selfdetermining: given determinacy, that is, nature as other than thought. The larger project of Hegel’s systematic philosophy then moves forward to consider what this (that which is not self-determining thought proper) is as a domain in which selfdetermination may be attained in the given. In effect it asks how freedom may emerge outside of pure thought. Nature or the real may be conceived broadly as a domain for the realization of freedom by embodied physical—human—beings, agent, or persons. In examining what that realization minimally involves, in the Encyclopedia and in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel presents the domain of spirit as an ethical world in which human beings interact as ethical agents, engaging in actions upon the nonhuman world along with other agents. Hegel’s account comes in many respects close to that of Fichte’s, as Surber’s analysis and exposition of Fichte make clear, and may help to bring some differences into focus.40 Fichte and Hegel agree that realizing one’s agency as free, as selfdetermining, involves the mutual recognition of one another as purposive agents, subjects with projects they aim to realize. However, for Hegel, unlike Fichte, while my engagement with and recognition of another’s free agency may be motivated by desire (my desire, say, to get you to relinquish a slice of your pizza), it nonetheless rises above desire. Assuming you give me a piece, the recognition as uncoerced rises above an action that can be explained as solely naturally determined just because it is dependent on and needs for its fulfillment the genuinely uncoerced agreement by the other. In coming to such agreement we recognize and constitute one another as free agents over and above, although not unconnected with, what we are as natural, desirous beings. Freedom is spiritual, not natural and given, because it is created. It does require nature in that persons must be embodied beings, but that alone does not establish their personhood. Recognition of personhood, of one’s standing and rights as a free being, is required. (This can be seen in the sadly persistent history of the denial of personhood to some human beings because of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or any of a host of naturally given characteristics which they did not choose.) Through acknowledging and respecting one another as persons, we constitute an open space for one another’s agency which makes possible our ability to engage in a variety of actions in which we can realize ourselves. In the Encyclopedia and The Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s account moves on to consider the broader economic, social, and political institutions which he sees as needed to make possible a wide array of modes in which we may realize ourselves. These institutions include the family, civil society, and the state. According to Hegel, the ways in which we relate to and interact with one another as family members, as economic agents, and as citizens differ, reflecting differing interests, aims, and concerns. To my mind Hegel’s account of the larger life world of freedom provides a richer realization of the ambitions of the German idealists than those offered by

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his predecessors. It certainly provided much for Marx, and his descendants such as Horkheimer and Adorno who continued the critical tradition, to chew on. A fair question today may be whether Hegel was wrong to believe that the market and its assorted ills and limitations could be constrained and ameliorated by the family, the state and by art, religion, and the life of the mind. Few things in the life world seem able to resist commodification. We seem to be in an era in which the pursuit of the expansion of wealth for its own sake, as an end in itself, coerces us to accommodate ourselves as means to the ends of that process, as manipulatable objects for production and consumption, rather than as free subjects. We may have been reduced to desiring wills as participants in an unending cycle of getting and using, sidelining our capacity to act as free rational agents. This may suggest gloomily that the emancipatory notion of reason the German Idealists held has been replaced by technical instrumental rationality where manipulation and control, productivity and growth, have become the final defensible ends, subordinating the natural world and its inhabitants, ourselves included, to perpetual manipulation and control, automata in a grim dystopian apocalypse with no end in sight.41

Notes Quine is quoted in The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, ed. E. Reck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 2013), p. 328. 2 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1975), p. 73. 3 Jere Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1966). 4 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). 5 Kant, Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten, in Kants Werke, vol. IV, AkademieTexausgabe, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1968. 6 Kant held of course that setting the law to ourselves was essential to establishing our freedom. 7 Nietzsche, Werke in drei Baenden, Karl Hanser Verlag, Meunchen, 1966. See especially vol. II for Jenseits von Gut und Boese, Zur Genealogie der Moral, and Die Froeliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche’s larger project involved the paradoxical task of making a philosophically critical assault on reason and religion, a philosophical attempt to rationally deconstruct reason. This colossal leveling was to clear the way for a new future and a new humanity. He also allowed that it could be apocalyptic. See, for example, paragraph 616 of Nietzsche’s Der Wille zur Macht (Stuttgart: Kroner Verlag, 1964). The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; W. Kaufmann, ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, Penguin Random House UK, 2017), p. 103. 9 “The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Napolean,” pp. 300–24, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 300, Oxford: Oxford University Press, D. McLellan ed., 1978. 10 Hegel’s, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1977), Hereafter, Phenomenology. This was the first completed 1

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book that Hegel wrote, finishing it in 1807 at Jena. It should not be confused with the phenomenology found in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The latter is part of philosophical science, the former is presented by Hegel as the opening path or “introduction” to the system. It sets forth “the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge.” Phenomenology, p. 49. 11 “Introduction” to the Phenomenology, pp. 46–57. 12 The system proper begins with the Science of Logic. 13 I believe this beginning may be traced to Descartes’ account of the primacy of the cogito as beyond all doubt in the Meditations. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. Rene Descartes and Donald A. Cress, 4th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). 14 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, p. 46. 15 See the Muenchausen trilemma. Baron Muenchausen as a fictional character attempts to extricate himself and his horse from a mire by pulling up on his own hair. 16 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1968, p. 269. Hume continues: “I am ready to throw all my books and papers into the fire, and resolve never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy.” He further resolves not “to strive against the current of nature, which leads me to indolence and pleasure.” Similar sentiments may be found in de Sade’s Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom. 17 On these topics see, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990). 18 Phenomenology, p. 15. Also see the Introduction to the Phenomenology, pp. 53 and 54. 19 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Orlando, FL. First published 1922. 20 See the Introduction to the Phenomenology, pp. 46–57. 21 There is an apocryphal story of a man telling his audience that the universe rests on and is supported by a gigantic tortoise. When asked by a woman in the audience what the tortoise rests on, he replies, “Lady, it’s tortoises all the way down.” 22 Robert Burns, “To a Mouse on Turning Up Her Nest with the Plough.” November, 1785. https://poets.org/poem/mouse, Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 90, New York. 23 Here, thinking and creative willing are at one. To think “X” is to at once create X. The creator is cognitively at one with the creation even while remaining ontologically distinct from it. 24 Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 49. 25 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 60, trans. revised. 26 Hegel’s Science of Logic, introduction, p. 49. 27 Hegel’s Science of Logic, The Doctrine of Being, p. 69. 28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921. As Bertrand Russell said, “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, 1918. Open Court Classics, Chicago, 1985 and Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018. www.oxfordreference.com › q-oro-ed4-00009021. 29 Such determining of determinacies is to be found in the penultimate logic of essence, not in the culminating logic of the concept, which treats of autonomous self-determination as a self-constitutive relating of identity and difference. The realization of such autonomy in the world we find given is constituted, fabricated, or created, by actions of self-determining agents mutually recognizing one another

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as such, thereby creating personhood as a space of limited freedom. Hegel addresses these topics in The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and in the Philosophy of Right. The extent to which the world into which we are “thrown” adequately enables such relationships, and who is entitled to them, is necessarily a matter of whether our worldy actions carry out “the strenuous effort of the concept.” (Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller, p. 35.) For this there can be no philosophical guarantees. Thus, in an important sense worldy freedom is something which we may choose to strive to attain and sustain. Freedom is not a gift from beyond but a human achievement which requires Bildung: our knowledge of what it consists in and our collective commitment to maintain it. One might consider the US civil rights struggle and the movement for acknowledging LGBTQ rights and Dr. M. L. King’s remark that the arc of history is slow but bends toward justice as reflecting a measure of Hegelian cautious optimism. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” …. According to Wikipedia, in this observation Dr. King adapts part of a sermon delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. … In that sermon, Parker said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one.” Dr. King paraphrases Parker in a speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968. See en.wikepedia.org. 30 Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 60, 70. 31 Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 53. 32 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 82. 33 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 70. 34 Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 72–3. 35 Marx was wrong to contend in the Theses on Feuerbach (Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 156, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) that all prior philosophy had ignored the material and practical circumstances of the human condition. Hegel certainly did not, addressing them in his Encyclopedia and especially in the Philosophy of Right. 36 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 82. 37 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 82. 38 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 105. 39 Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 82–3. 40 Surber, Language and German Idealism, pp. 48–56. 41 See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964 and 1991). The question of the extent to which life in contemporary capitalist societies fits this dire dystopian account remains an important topic of consideration. Stanley Kubrick’s films A Clockwork Orange, Paths of Glory, and Dr. Strangelove explore this topic, as does Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett puts it on stage in Waiting for Godot as does Bertolt Brecht in Mother Courage and Peter Weiss in The Assassination and Persecution of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Chapter 2 H E G E L’ S S P E C U L AT I V E S E N T E N C E : F R E E D OM F R OM   P R E SU P P O SI T IO N S Stephen Houlgate

Surber on Hegel’s Speculative Sentence In his essay, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence” (1975), Jere Surber maintains that Hegel is perhaps the first thinker in the Western tradition directly to consider whether “systematic metaphysical reflection” can be expressed through the “finite capacities of natural language.”1 In Surber’s view, Hegel argues that such reflection can be expressed through language because the “movement of the ‘negative’” at the heart of his own metaphysical system is displayed by “the most fundamental structure of language” itself: the subject-predicate relation. We can express (or at least begin to express) the true nature of thought, therefore, by explicating the dialectical character of the simple “copulative proposition” and showing the latter to be in truth a “speculative sentence.”2 What, then, is the “dialectical movement of the proposition itself ” (PS 40/ PG 48)?3 In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel answers this question by examining the proposition “God is being” (PS 38/PG 46), and Surber provides a lucid account of Hegel’s argument in his essay. In this proposition, Surber explains, the subject “God” is, at first sight, “put forward simply as an empty name” that is then determined by the predicate. The determination contained in the predicate, namely “being,” thus appears to be the “locus of meaning of the proposition.”4 The proposition, it seems, states that “God” is just being. This is not to say that the proposition is “simply a substitution rule directing us to ‘substitute’ the word ‘Being’ at every place at which the word ‘God’ occurs.” Interpreting the proposition in this way, Surber explains, would reduce it to a mere tautology in which “nothing meaningful was communicated.” The proposition, however, is intended to have meaning, so the predicate cannot just be a substitute for the subject. It must rather express “the ‘essential nature’ of the subject”: the predicate “being” must tell us what “God” actually is.5 Yet this reading of the proposition appears to result in the “loss of the subject”: for if the meaning of the subject-term is first provided by the predicate, this would seem to “dispense with the need for a separate indicator occupying the

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subject-place of the proposition.”6 It would seem that the meaning expressed in the proposition is contained in the predicate alone, or (in Hegel’s words) that the predicate “has the significance of something substantial in which the subject is dissolved [zerfließt]” (PS 38/PG 46). Surber argues, however, that the subject-term must be preserved, because the predicate does not in fact exhaust the proposition: it expresses the essential nature of the subject. Moreover, the subject-term cannot just be an “empty sound,” as we first thought, but must have a “concrete reference”— namely, the subject whose “essential nature” is determined by the predicate.7 There must, therefore, be a genuine difference between subject and predicate in the proposition, and so, insofar as the predicate expresses the essence of the subject, the proposition as a whole must be understood to express the identity-indifference of the subject and predicate.8 This is not now to deny that the subject is in one sense “lost” in the movement of predication. What is lost, however, is not the subject altogether, but the fixed character that is conferred on the subject by its place in the proposition. In the latter the subject appears as a fixed, given subject—“God”—and the predicate appears as a separate determination connected to the subject by the copula. On Hegel’s interpretation, however, the predicate is not simply separate from the subject, but takes us deeper into the latter by disclosing its “essential nature.” The predicate thus returns us to, or (in Surber’s words) “recoils upon,” the subject and further determines it.9 The initial fixity of the subject is thereby undermined, and in that sense “lost,” because its essential nature is understood to be disclosed in the movement of predication itself. In Hegel’s words, “thinking therefore loses the firm objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and, in the predicate, does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content” (PS 39/PG 47). Surber argues that, in this interpretation of the proposition, the difference between subject and predicate is preserved, because the predicate tells us about the subject and the latter is conceived in turn as the “ground of the predication.” Yet the proposition also expresses the identity of subject and predicate: for the subject is understood to be “complex within itself ” and to have a meaning that extends into, and is further determined by, the predicate.10 In this sense, the proposition is speculative and dialectical. In a later essay, Surber notes that, for Hegel, the speculative proposition is “equally linguistic and logical.”11 (So there is no need to draw a sharp distinction between a sentence and a proposition when considering Hegel’s “spekulativer Satz.”)12 The proposition, therefore, does not just transform the grammatical subject into something complex that is articulated in the movement of predication, but it also transforms the logical subject—the concept of the subject as such—in the same way. Surber makes a related point in his 1975 essay when he maintains that the dialectical movement of the proposition, described by Hegel, reveals that the conscious subject, like the grammatical subject, is not just fixed but exists in and through the utterances of language. For Hegel, Surber writes, “only in language does the conscious subject have his existence as conscious”; “what we directly apprehend in understanding language,” therefore, “is the

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immediate objective existence of thought.”13 Yet thought (or consciousness) and language are also different, in Hegel’s view, since “thought can never be totally exhausted in any particular instance of language or linguistic formulation.”14 In the speculative proposition, therefore, as Surber puts it, “the relation of thought and language proves itself to be a concrete unity, a dialectical identity-indifference.”15 According to Surber, therefore, Hegel’s account of the speculative proposition is not only an analysis of the way language works, but it also discloses the dialectical, developmental character of thought—the true nature of the thinking subject. Hegel thus arrives at a metaphysical understanding of thought and subjectivity by examining the “speculative” character of language. In so doing he demonstrates not just that “finite” human language can express metaphysical understanding, but that it articulates the metaphysical character of thought through its very form— through the form of the proposition. If we are to develop an appropriate language for philosophy, therefore, we do not need to look beyond ordinary language and predication; we simply need to make explicit what is going on in such language itself. As Surber puts it, “if an extra-ordinary way of speaking philosophically is to arise from Hegel’s concept of philosophical reflection, it is not such that it opposes itself to ordinary language, but rather can arise only when we take in its full complexity the ordinary form of language itself.”16 It is important to emphasize at this point that, for Surber, speculative propositions or sentences do not constitute “a distinct class of sentences” in contrast to “others which cannot be so characterized.”17 Speculative propositions are ordinary subject-predicate sentences whose dialectical, speculative character is brought out by philosophical reflection. Surber notes that Hegel’s example, “God is being,” might seem to be speculative through its distinctive content rather than its form, but he insists that, for Hegel, the “common form” of every predicative proposition exhibits a “fundamental dialectical structure.”18 Surber’s Hegel, therefore, does not draw a clear distinction between speculative propositions and ordinary judgments. He maintains, rather, that Kant simplifies the ordinary proposition by regarding it as a judgment (governed by “a purely formal notion of identity”), whereas he (Hegel) wants to highlight the “speculative ‘traces’” in ordinary, natural language.19 For Surber, Hegel’s idea of the speculative proposition is thus a “radical reinterpretation” of Kant’s notion of judgment, rather than the thought of a type of sentence altogether different from a judgment. Hegel’s claim, as Surber puts it, is that “upon a philosophical or ‘speculative’ analysis, the ‘Satz’ turns out to express not a mere ‘identity’ between concepts but a fully internally mediated ‘identity-in-difference’ between its terms.”20 In other words, the “Satz,” which Kant regards as a judgment, turns out not to be a mere judgment after all, but to be a speculative sentence. A sentence proves to be speculative, therefore, “by virtue of the very manner in which we comprehend and reflect upon it.”21 The sentence itself “calls forth the activity of thought” through the way it determines the subject through the predicate—by stating, for example, that “God is being”; but it is thought or reflection that thinks the subject and predicate as both different and identical—as

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a speculative unity.22 A speculative sentence is thus an ordinary sentence that is interpreted as speculative, rather than as a judgment. Surber returns to the topic of the speculative sentence in his book, What Is Philosophy? (2014), and confirms his earlier interpretation of Hegel’s idea. So, we are told, Hegel criticizes philosophers such as Kant for understanding the relation between subject and predicate in a proposition “principally in terms of identity” and “thereby suppressing the equally crucial differences between them.”23 He then offers a “counter-interpretation” of the proposition, according to which “the logical copula must be understood as expressing both an identity of and a difference between the terms or concepts that it joins.” Indeed, for Hegel, the logical copula, “when unfolded in its full meaning, expresses the dynamic movement of thought itself.”24 More precisely, Surber notes, propositions provoke reflective readers to understand them as expressing such movement. It is thus our understanding that “injects” movement into the proposition by interpreting it as speculative. This in turn means that, for Surber’s Hegel, there are not two different types of proposition: “speculative” and “formal.” There are, rather, “two ways of philosophically interpreting the same proposition: a ‘speculative’ interpretation that views the proposition as expressing the movement or process of simultaneous identification and differentiation, and a ‘formal’ reading that focuses upon only the first and suppresses the latter”25—though Surber notes that some propositions can be read as more explicitly speculative than others.26 This account of the speculative proposition echoes the one found in Surber’s earlier writings. Now, however, Surber states that the idea of the speculative proposition must be “disengaged” from what (following Deleuze) he calls “Hegel’s own image of thought.”27 This does not mean he now denies that the proposition expresses identity and difference, as well as the dynamic movement of thought. What he rejects is a further idea that he attributes to Hegel: namely, that we should think of the identity-in-difference expressed in one proposition as a “higher” identity that can be expressed in another proposition that in turn must be understood as “speculative.” The problem Surber sees with this idea is that it conceives of the understanding of propositions as a “reiterative” process dictating that thought always follow a “single, undeviating trajectory” from less complex concepts and propositions to more complex ones.28 This conception is problematic, for Surber, because it conflicts with his view that a proposition contains “a network of linkages among concepts” that permit a “multiplicity of trajectories for each concept along which thought can move.”29

A Different Understanding of Hegel Surber’s 1975 essay exercised an important influence on my own early work on Hegel.30 Yet my understanding of Hegel differs in significant ways from Surber’s. First, in contrast to Surber, I think that Hegel distinguishes, not merely between two ways of understanding propositions, but between “two types of propositions, ‘speculative’ and ‘formal’.”31 Indeed, he distinguishes between three types. In book

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three of his Science of Logic—The Doctrine of the Concept (1816)—Hegel maintains that a simple proposition or sentence (Satz) contains a grammatical subject and predicate but “is not for that reason a judgment [Urteil].”32 If, for example, a sentence connects something specific and singular, such as an individual person, with something else that is specific and singular, such as a date, it is just a proposition. So, for example, a statement such as “Aristotle died at the age of 73 in the fourth year of the 115th Olympiad” is “a mere proposition, not a judgment” (SL 553/ LB 61). A judgment, by contrast, connects a subject (singular or plural) with a universal, such as a property, as in the statement “the rose is red” or “the human being is mortal” (SL 558, 569/LB 68, 81). Judgments, therefore, do more than state facts; they subsume a subject under a more universal concept.33 It is clear, however—to my mind, at least—that speculative sentences are neither simple propositions nor judgments. Hegel claims in the Preface to the Phenomenology that “the nature of the judgement or proposition as such, which involves the distinction of subject and predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition” (PS 38/PG 46). He then states in book one of the Logic—The Doctrine of Being (2nd ed. 1832)—that “the proposition, in the form of a judgment, is not suited to express speculative truths” (SL 67/LS 82). The judgment, he continues, “joins subject and predicate in a connection of identity,” but “if the content is speculative, the non-identity of subject and predicate is also an essential moment” and “this is not expressed in the judgment.”34 What is required in philosophy, therefore, is a form of language that can express speculative unity—for example, the unity of being and nothing—“as an unrest of simultaneous incompatibles, as a movement” (SL 67/LS 82) and, as we learn in the Phenomenology, such language must consist of (or at least include) speculative propositions. In the rest of this essay I will explain the difference between a judgment and a speculative sentence, as I understand it—or as I believe Hegel understands it. As we will see, judgments, for Hegel, are themselves dialectical, but they remain different in kind from speculative sentences. As such, judgments are the appropriate form of language and thought for pre-Kantian metaphysics, but not for post-Kantian speculative metaphysics. Before examining the judgment and speculative sentence, however, I will briefly indicate the second way in which my understanding of Hegel differs from that of Surber. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, the guiding imperative behind Hegel’s philosophy is that it should avoid taking anything for granted about thought or being—that it should suspend, at the start, all our familiar assumptions about how to think and what there is.35 Such assumptions are undermined in two ways before Hegel’s philosophy begins with the science of logic: on the one hand, by phenomenology and, on the other hand, by the simple “resolve” to think without systematic presuppositions. In his Encyclopedia Logic Hegel explains this second option as follows: “Science should be preceded by universal doubt, i.e., by total presuppositionlessness [Voraussetzungslosigkeit]. Strictly speaking, this requirement is fulfilled by the freedom that abstracts from everything, and grasps its own pure abstraction, the simplicity of thinking—in the resolve [Entschluß] of the will to think purely.”36 This is not to deny that philosophy, for Hegel, has historical and

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hermeneutical presuppositions, including most obviously an interest in thinking without presuppositions.37 Hegel’s philosophy begins, however, by “setting aside all reflections, all opinions, that one otherwise has” about thought, language and the world, and thinking pure indeterminate being (SL 47/LS 58).38 By contrast, Surber—especially in his more recent work—thinks that Hegel’s thought is very far from being systematically “presuppositionless.” In What Is Philosophy?, for example, he claims that “one of Hegel’s most fundamental assumptions is that the concepts and propositions of which they are elements, viewed either formally or speculatively, are completely determined by a specific configuration of an identity and its corresponding difference (or differences).”39 Surber wishes to “disengage” the speculative sentence from this “assumption”— and from others he takes to constitute “Hegel’s own image of thought”—and to integrate it into a philosophical position that affirms the “finite” and “limited” character of human thought and the necessarily “multiple” trajectories implicit in any proposition.40 To my mind, however, Surber departs from Hegel on the basis of significant assumptions of his own. He assumes that thought is irreducibly finite, limited, and open to multiple trajectories; that we cannot “suspend” the limitations associated with our finite, embodied being, but can at most try to repress “issues of embodied being”41; and that Hegel does the latter through his guiding “image of thought.” Surber assumes from the start, therefore, that Hegel cannot do what he aims to do, namely proceed from a beginning that may “presuppose nothing” (SL 48/LS 58). According to Surber, it is better for philosophers “from the beginning” to “avoid presenting their thought or texts as anything more than a finite mobilization.”42 According to Hegel, as I read him, however, philosophy should begin by setting aside all assumptions about (or “images” of) thought, whether they take thought to be completely determinate, dialectical, or irreducibly finite and multiple. This difference in interpretation merits more detailed discussion, but I will not provide that in this essay. I will turn instead to set out my understanding of the relation between the speculative sentence and the judgment in Hegel’s thought—an understanding that is indebted to, but (as I have indicated) significantly different from, that of Surber.43

Hegel on Judgment In my view, Hegel emphasizes in several texts that speculative thought and judgment differ from one another. The simple form of a judgment, he contends— namely, “S is P” or “S is not P”—indicates that it is a statement about something given or presupposed. This is because it sets the subject (S) apart from the predicate (P) that it attaches to (or detaches from) that subject. In so doing, the judgment presents the predicate in turn as something distinct from the subject, so “judgment has in general totalities for its sides, totalities that are at first essentially self-subsistent [selbständig]” (SL 552/LB 60). Understood properly, the affirmative judgment also declares that its subject and predicate form an inseparable unity—a

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unity expressed in the copula “is,” which “indicates that the predicate belongs to the being of the subject and is not merely externally combined with it.” Yet the form of such a judgment remains at odds with this unity, precisely because it separates the subject and predicate (and, indeed, the copula) from one another both logically and grammatically. There is, however, a further problem with the judgment, which besets metaphysical judgments in particular. The problem is that judgment presents the subject as something given and familiar to us—such as “God”—but also indicates that subjects (or objects) “receive their firm determination only through thinking,” that is, only through judgment and predication (EL 69/97 [§ 31]). So, for example, when we judge that “God is eternal,” we begin with the familiar representation “God” and this serves as the criterion for our judgment; we are thus right to judge God to be eternal, if “eternity” belongs to, or is at least compatible with, our prior representation of him. On the other hand, however, before we have explicitly recognized through a judgment that God is eternal, “what he is, is not yet known”; what we have initially is thus in fact an underdetermined representation of God, and “only the predicate” of the explicit judgment we go on to make “states expressly what he is.” So our initial representation of God is meant to provide a “firm hold” for our judgment, but such judgment implicitly undermines that firm hold, since it is itself what first renders our representation firmly determinate (EL 68–9/97 [§ 31 and Remark]). In Hegel’s view, this problem inevitably besets pre-Kantian metaphysics. The objects of such metaphysics are purely intelligible objects, not things that are given to us in empirical experience, so we cannot base our ideas of God or the soul on what we see around us, as we can in the case of the trees in our garden. In thinking about God or the soul, therefore, we must begin from a representation of them— produced by thought or imagination—which will then provide the criterion for our judgments about them. Yet it is only through such judgments, in which the predicates of God or the soul are identified, that we have a firmly determinate representation of the latter in the first place. Our initial representation of God is thus not as firm and determinate as we take it to be, but this means that the judgments we make on the basis of that representation are not as well-grounded as we think, either. The pre-Kantian metaphysical mode of thinking bases its judgments on representations that are themselves rendered firmly determinate by those judgments; both the judgments and the representations, therefore, are left hanging in the air without a firm ground. This problem is not quite so acute in ordinary, empirical judgment, since in that case the subject of the judgment is a determinate empirical thing (or event). Nonetheless, even in this case the subject is rendered fully determinate only by the predicate of the judgment, so there is a tension in the empirical judgment, too, between the initial determinacy of the subject and the determinacy disclosed through the judgment itself.44 Speculative thought, for Hegel, is quite different from both metaphysical judgment (in the pre-Kantian sense) and ordinary judgment, since it does not presuppose a given determinate subject and attach given determinate predicates

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to it externally. Such thought begins from the indeterminate thought of being and then simply follows the immanent development, or self-determination, of that thought itself. It thus has a very different conception from metaphysics (and from ordinary “reasoning”) of the “subject” of thought in the two senses that are identified by Surber: the conscious or knowing subject and the subject of predication, the subject that is known.45 First, whereas the knowing subject in metaphysics takes itself to be engaged in the activity of judgment (albeit guided in part by a representation of God or another subject-matter), the knowing subject in speculative thought conceives of itself primarily as passive, rather than active. Hegel indicates this through his insistence that such thought should “sink” (versenken) itself in the content before it and “let” that content “move itself ” (sich bewegen) (PS 36/PG 44). This is not mere rhetoric on Hegel’s part; he means what he says. In speculative logic we think the true nature of something, only when we allow our thought to be wholly determined by that thing, that category, itself. Second, whereas the subject, or subject-matter, known in metaphysics is taken to be a given subject with a firm, settled identity (even if, from another viewpoint, it first acquires its firm identity through the activity of judgment), the subjectmatter of speculative thought is not firm and settled at all, but is dynamic and selfmoving. Indeed, its dynamic character is evident right from the start: it is initially pure being, but this immediately vanishes into nothing, which then vanishes in turn into pure being, such that both being and nothing prove to be nothing but such vanishing (see SL 59–60/LS 71–2). This vanishing, which Hegel calls “becoming,” then mutates logically into further categories, including determinate being, something, finitude, and so on. Each category is a new one with a new logical structure, but each is equally a further determination of pure being. By giving rise to new categories, being—which is the initial subject-matter—thus proves to be the process of its own immanent development, or the “movement of being itself ” (Bewegung des Seins selbst) (SL 56/LS 69). In this movement, being continues uninterrupted, since each new category is a further determination of it. Yet it continues precisely by turning into new categories that are more than just pure being. The subject-matter of speculative logic does not, therefore, remain firm and settled, but changes before our eyes as new determinations of it emerge. In a more conventional philosophical text, such as Leibniz’s Monadology (1714), the subject-matter remains unaltered throughout: at the start of Leibniz’s great work we are told that the monad is “nothing but a simple substance,” and by the end it has not come to be anything different (though, of course, we now know a lot more about it).46 In the course of Hegel’s Logic, by contrast, pure being does come to be something different; indeed, it mutates through a whole series of different forms. The ground on which one stands at the start of the Logic is thus constantly shifting, though in a rational, necessary, immanently determined manner. Hegel draws particular attention to this distinction between (on the one hand) a firm and settled and (on the other) a dynamic subject-matter of thought in the Preface to the Phenomenology. What he calls “ratiocinative” (räsonnierend)

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thinking—the thinking we encounter in ordinary life, as well as in pre-Kantian metaphysics—usually assumes that it confronts some definite, given subjectmatter to which predicates can be attached in judgments. This subject-matter is what our thinking is about, or, as Hegel puts it, it is the “basis to which the content”—the predicates or “accidents” of the matter concerned—“is attached, and upon which the movement”—of judging and reasoning—“runs back and forth.” Things are different, however, in speculative thinking, since what we are thinking there is “the coming-to-be [Werden] of the object.” This “object”—namely, being—is thus “not a static [ruhend] subject inertly supporting the accidents,” but “on the contrary the self-moving concept” (or self-moving being). At the start of speculative logic, ordinary or metaphysical thought may think that being is the settled, “static,” or “inert” subject-matter, but in the movement to which being gives rise, and in which it changes, “this static subject itself perishes”: “the solid ground which argumentation [Räsonnieren] has”—or thinks it has—“in the static subject is therefore shaken, and only this movement itself becomes the object” (PS 36–7/PG 44–5). Of course, non-speculative thought may also think about the way things change, but then such change is itself the settled, or at least the given, subjectmatter of thought: it is there to be thought about. In speculative logic, by contrast, the dynamic subject-matter is not simply there: it is not given at the start. We begin with an utterly indeterminate thought that then vanishes and turns into a series of further thoughts (each of which is different from the others), and in this way such logic comes to have a rich, dynamic subject-matter that is more than pure being. This subject-matter is thus one that “emerges” (emergiert) in the course of logic; it is not one that is given in advance as that about which we are to think (PS 33/PG 40).

Hegel on the Speculative Sentence In the Logic Hegel insists that the emergence of logic’s subject-matter cannot be expressed or articulated in mere judgments (see SL 67, 744/LS 82, LB 295). So how is it to be expressed? The answer is found in the Preface to the Phenomenology: it must be expressed (principally) in “speculative sentences” (spekulative Sätze). Such sentences have a grammatical subject and predicate, like a judgment, but the logical relation between the two is different from that in a judgment, for the grammatical predicate is “no longer a predicate of the subject, but is the substance, the essence and the concept of what is under discussion” (PS 37/PG 45, emphasis added). Consider, for example, the following two sentences: “the actual is universal” and “the actual is the universal.” The first is a simple judgment in which a subject, “the actual,” is named and then said to have the property of being “universal.” Since that property is predicated of the subject, that subject is thought in the judgment to precede the property. The subject does not, therefore, emerge in the course of the judgment itself, but, thanks to the form of the latter, is thought in it as that which comes first and that

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which the judgment is about. This is true of every judgment, in Hegel’s view, and explains why mere judgments cannot express the emergence of their subjects. This is not to deny that there is a tension in the first sentence above: the subject, the “actual,” precedes the predicate, “universal,” and yet is rendered more determinate by that predicate and in that sense does not simply precede it.47 Nonetheless, the logical form of the judgment explicitly sets the subject apart from and ahead of the predicate—as a “ready-made, given subject” (EL 68/97 [§ 30])—and in that respect does not present that subject as something that emerges in the course of the judgment. The logical structure of the second—speculative—sentence is subtly different. In this case, Hegel maintains, “the universal is not meant to have merely the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition asserted only that the actual is universal; on the contrary, the universal is meant to express the essence of the actual” (PS 39/PG 47). Since the actual in the speculative sentence has a structure of its own (disclosed in the logic of essence), it can be said to come first in that sentence, too; yet in another and more important sense it does not come first but emerges with the thought of “the universal.” The reason for this is that what Hegel understands by “essence” in his remarks on the sentence is not just a property of a thing from which the thing can be distinguished, but the true nature of the thing itself. The speculative sentence does not, therefore, just attach a predicate to a distinct subject that is already given, but it gives us the subject, as it truly is, through the grammatical predicate. It reveals that the actual itself is in truth the universal, and in this way it presents the emergence of its subject-matter: the actual’s coming to be what it truly is. Now the sentence “the actual is the universal,” discussed in the Phenomenology’s Preface, appears in neither the Logic, nor the Encyclopaedia Logic, and is in fact an unlikely candidate for inclusion in either text, since it skips over the thought that the actual must prove to be substance before it proves to be the universal. There are, however, other sentences in Hegel’s two texts on logic that are clearly speculative ones. Consider the following examples from the Encyclopaedia Logic: being is the passing [Übergehen] into nothing and […] nothing is the passing into being. (EL 144/191 [§ 88 Remark]) As reflected into itself in this its determinacy, determinate being [Dasein] is that which is determinate, something [Daseiendes, Etwas]. (EL 146/195 [§ 90]) Quantity, posited essentially with the excluding determinacy that it contains, is quantum, or limited quantity. (EL 161/214 [§ 101])

Each sentence is an identity statement that tells us through the grammatical predicate what the subject is in truth, rather than a judgment that merely attaches

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a logical predicate to a given subject. Yet there is also a difference between what the subject is first said to be and what it proves to be in the course of the sentence. So being is said to be, not just being, but the passing into nothing; determinate being is said to be, not just determinate, but something; and quantity is said to be, not just pure quantity, but a quantum. There is thus a movement in each sentence—“the dialectical movement of the proposition itself ” (PS 40/PG 48)—in which the true nature of the subject emerges, and the sentences, accordingly, are speculative ones. Note, however, that these speculative sentences do not suffer from the problem that besets metaphysical judgments. In such judgments the subject is (or appears to be) given “ready-made” through representation, prior to a predicate being attached to it; and yet it is only through the predicate that we know precisely what the subject is, that we have a “firm” conception of the subject. A judgment, such as “God is eternal,” thus pulls us in two different directions: for it asks us to look back to God to see whether the predicate “eternal” belongs to him, but equally to look forward to that predicate to understand clearly what “God” is in the first place. Speculative sentences, by contrast, point in one direction, namely that of the grammatical predicate: for the subject in each case, though different from the predicate, is not thought to be a “ready-made, given subject,” but is presented as coming into its true nature, and so as emerging, in and through that predicate. This might appear to be at odds with the claim Hegel makes in the Phenomenology that in a speculative sentence we are “thrown back” (zurückgeworfen) by the predicate to the subject (PS 39/PG 47). Hegel’s point, however, is not that in a speculative sentence, as in judgment, we have to look back to the subject to confirm that the predicate applies to it; it is rather that the predicate causes us to revise our initial conception of the subject. The predicate of a speculative sentence does this, precisely because it reveals, or renders explicit, the true nature of the subject that is initially no more than implicit. Such a sentence reveals that being is not just “being” after all, but the passing into nothing, and that determinate being is not just “determinate being” as such, but takes the form of “something.” We are “thrown back” to the subject by the predicate, therefore, because the predicate is where the subject, which we thought we knew definitively, emerges in its true light. The fact that the predicate discloses the true character or “essence” of the subject explains why speculative thought develops in a single direction, and does not issue in “multiple thought trajectories,” as Surber contends.48 Hegel does not therefore simply assume that speculative thought follows a “single process or trajectory of unfolding” and thereby deny the “multiplicity” inherent in thought. His speculative sentences render explicit what being proves—through its own immanent necessity—to be, and so reveal the “single trajectory” that is inherent in being itself. Speculative thought, for Hegel, thus expresses itself most adequately through speculative sentences. Yet I do not think that he means such sentences to be the sole mode of expression of speculative thought; and indeed by no means every sentence in his two texts on logic is speculative in the way he describes. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, for example—in which “science is not presented in the detailed development of its particularisation” (EL 39/60 [§ 16])—even the main

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paragraphs, which (in contrast to the Remarks and Additions) carry the logic forward, contain more than just speculative sentences. More importantly, in the Logic, in which the dialectical transformation of categories is set out in its full complexity, the sentences employed by Hegel to do so are of several different kinds. Many are recognizably speculative, such as the claims that “something and other are, first, both determinate beings [Daseiende] or somethings” and that “second, each is equally an other” (SL 90/LS 112) (or at least the claims contained in these sentences, namely that the other is a something and that something is an other, are speculative ones). Other sentences look much like ordinary judgments, since they attach predicates to subjects, as in the claims that “Dasein is determinate” and that “something has a quality and in it is not only determined but limited” (SL 101/LS 125). (The predicates, however, are drawn from the purely immanent study of the subjects themselves, so the sentences are not judgments in the metaphysical sense, or of course ordinary empirical judgments.) Yet other sentences are neither simple speculative ones nor simple judgments, but complex sentences that articulate the development of a category through various stages, such as this one: What de facto is at hand is this: determinate being [Dasein] as such, distinction in it, and the sublation of this distinction; determinate being, not void of distinctions as at the beginning, but as again self-equal through the sublation of the distinction; the simplicity of determinate being mediated through this sublation. (SL 88–9/LS 110)

(One could, however, regard this sentence as an extended speculative one, since it presents Dasein as a complex process of development.) Note, too, that Hegel is not averse to using striking metaphors at times, as when he says of finite things that “the hour of their birth is the hour of their death” (SL 101/LS 126). Hegel’s varied linguistic practice in the Logic suggests, therefore, that, in his view, speculative sentences are not the only ones that are suitable for speculative logic. Surber writes in one essay that Hegel’s Logic should be “viewed as a type of speculative discourse, consisting entirely of ‘spekulative Sätze’.”49 In my view, however, what Surber has said more recently about philosophical texts applies to Hegel’s Logic: it is not merely an “assemblage of logical statements,” but besides speculative sentences it also incorporates “emphasis, inflection, nuance, qualification, and a wide variety of other devices.”50 Hegel’s explicit reflections on the speculative sentence show him to be acutely aware of the importance of developing an appropriate language for speculative thought. He declares that philosophy does not need a “special terminology” or vocabulary, but has “the right [Recht] to choose such expressions from the language of ordinary life […] as seem to approximate the determinations of the concept” (that is, the categories) (SL 12, 628/LS 11, LB 154); yet, he clearly thinks that philosophy needs to craft appropriate sentences to express its distinctive truths. In my view, however, Hegel does not believe that these sentences all need to be speculative in the precise sense outlined in the Phenomenology’s Preface. What

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is more important is that the sentences taken together avoid turning categories into the given, settled subjects of judgment, and instead articulate the immanent transformation of each category into another, that is, each category’s becoming other than itself (and thereby coming into its own truth). Such sentences, in other words, must form speculative paragraphs and pages, and express speculative arguments, even if they are not all speculative (or fully so) themselves. Note that such paragraphs and arguments cannot just be concatenations of judgments, not only because the latter present their subjects as something given and “fixed,” but also because they are, in Hegel’s view, essentially one-sided. Hegel makes this point explicitly in the Logic. At the start of logic pure being and pure nothing immediately vanish into, and thereby become, one another. In so doing, each proves to be the same as the other, since it becomes that other; yet, the two remain different, since each vanishes into, and becomes, the other, its opposite. Each proves, therefore, to be the same as and different from the other at the same time. It is both the same and different, however, only in the process of becoming its other, that is, only in its dialectical movement. In the second remark following his account of being and nothing, Hegel then considers the claim that “being and nothing are one and the same” as a simple judgment. As such, this claim is abstracted from the process of becoming just described and is a simple assertion in its own right. It is, however, one-sided, since being and nothing are also different; indeed, this difference is implicitly contained in the very statement of their sameness, since the latter states that being and nothing are the same. The simple judgment that they are the same thus needs to be supplemented by the further judgment that “being and nothing are not the same.” Yet this still leaves us falling short of the truth of the matter: for it merely sets up what Hegel calls an “antinomy”—“being and nothing are the same, yet they are not the same”—but this does not enable us to think of the categories as the same and different at the same time. As indicated above, we can do this only when being and nothing are thought as vanishing into, and so becoming, one another: as Hegel puts it, their “union” can be thought only “as an unrest of simultaneous incompatibles, as a movement.” This movement, however, is lost when all we have is a sequence of judgments that state first one thing and then the opposite (SL 66–7/LS 81–2). Speculative logic may not need to be articulated purely in speculative sentences, but it is clear that it cannot be presented in a series of judgments. Not only does every judgment present its subject as something given and settled, but each is also one-sided and a series of one-sided utterances cannot express and bring before our mind the movement and emergence of a subject-matter. Hegel’s aim, however, is precisely to bring such movement to mind. His sentences, therefore, cannot all be simple judgments, but—whether speculative or more straightforward—they must give adequate linguistic expression to the “immanent development” of being. Surber maintains that speculative sentences, for Hegel, are simply ordinary subject-predicate propositions conceived in a speculative manner. In my view, by contrast, they are a different kind of sentence from ordinary ones, whether the latter are judgments or mere Sätze. They are the sentences through which— principally, if not exclusively—philosophy articulates the emergence of truth from

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indeterminate thought and being. Surber and I thus understand Hegel’s speculative sentence in different ways. My understanding, however, is deeply indebted to the account of the speculative sentence that I first encountered in Surber’s work.

Notes Jere Paul Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence” 211–30, Hegel-Studien 10 (1975), p. 211. 2 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence”, p. 212. Hegel’s term is “spekulativer Satz” (which can be translated as “speculative sentence” or “speculative proposition”). See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) [PS], p. 38, and G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. H. F. Wessels and H. Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988) [PG], p. 46. Further references to Hegel’s Phenomenology will be given in the form: PS 38/PG 46. (Note that English translations of Hegel’s works have occasionally been altered in this essay.) 3 See Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 214. 4 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” pp. 218–19. 5 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 219. See PS 38/PG 46. 6 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 220. 7 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 220. 8 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 225: “subject and predicate are affirmed in a relation to one another more complex than simple identity.” 9 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 221. 10 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” pp. 221, 223. 11 Jere P. Surber, “The Problems of Language in German Idealism: An Historical and Conceptual Overview,” 305–36, in Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic, ed. O. K. Wiegand et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 330–1. 12 In setting out his own position in his more recent work, however, Surber draws a clear distinction between “(eidetic) propositions” and “their expression in (significational) sentences.” See Jere O’Neill Surber, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality (Melbourne: Re.press, 2014), p. 236. 13 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” pp. 222, 228. 14 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 228. 15 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” pp. 229–30. 16 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 224. 17 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 227. 18 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 218. 19 Jere O’Neill Surber, “Introduction,” 1–31, in Hegel and Language, ed. J. O. Surber (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), p. 12. 20 Surber, “The Problems of Language in German Idealism,” p. 330. 21 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 228. 22 Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 229. 23 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 224. 24 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 224–5. 25 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 225. 26 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 204–5. 1

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27 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 224. 28 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 225–6. 29 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 228. 30 See, for example, Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 141–56. 31 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 225. 32 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. G. Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [SL], p. 553, and G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), ed. H. J. Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003) [LB], p. 61. For the German texts of books one and two of the Science of Logic— The Doctrine of Being (2nd Ed.) (1832) and The Doctrine of Essence (1813)—see G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), ed. H. J. Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2008) [LS], and G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Die Lehre vom Wesen (1813), ed. H. J. Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999) [LW]. Further references to Hegel’s Logic will be given in the form: SL 553/LB 61 (or SL 59/LS 71). 33 In The Doctrine of Essence Hegel maintains that the determinations of reflection— including identity, difference, and diversity—can all be given the form of “propositions” (Sätzen) (SL 354/LW 24). Each determination is a “self-relating” determination and therefore has an identity of its own, but each also contains a relation within itself: identity, for example, is “identity with itself ” (Identität mit sich) (SL 355–6/LW 25, 27). A proposition (Satz) in turn expresses a relation between two moments that are logically identical to one another (such as a singular individual and a singular date), whereas a judgment connects two moments that are logically distinct (such as a singular individual and a universal property). Determinations of reflection can thus be expressed as propositions, such as A = A, but not as judgments. 34 Indeed, the judgment does not make explicit the difference it contains within itself— the logical difference between something singular and a universal—since it expresses in the copula only the identity between subject and predicate. (The difference between subject and predicate becomes explicit in a negative judgment, such as “the rose is not red,” but then the moment of identity in judgment is lost.) 35 See Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), pp. 29–53. 36 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991) [EL], p. 124 [§ 78 Remark], and G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) [EL], p. 168 [§ 78 Remark]. Further references to the Encyclopedia Logic will be given in the following form: EL 124/168 [§ 78 Remark]). 37 See Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, pp. 54–71. 38 Other commentators who emphasize the “presuppositionless” character of Hegel’s logic include William Maker and Richard Dien Winfield. See William Maker, Philosophy without Foundations. Rethinking Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 76, and Richard Dien Winfield, Hegel’s Science of Logic. A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), p. 13. 39 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 226, emphasis added.

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40 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 224, 226–8, 321–2. See also Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” p. 211: “the radically finite character of linguistic expression.” 41 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 103–4. 42 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 241. 43 On Hegel’s account of the speculative sentence, see also Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, pp. 141–56, and Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, pp. 93–8. 44 On Hegel’s conception of judgment, see Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, pp. 157–66. 45 See Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence”, pp. 215–16. 46 G. W. Leibniz, Monadology 268–81, in G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, trans. R. Francks and R. S. Woolhouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 268 [§ 1]. 47 This tension, generated by the form of the judgment, is similar to that found in metaphysical judgments. In the latter, however, there is the added problem that the subject is merely a metaphysical “representation” (rather than a properly derived concept, or something empirical), and so does not provide the firm ground for predication that it appears to provide. 48 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 226. 49 Surber, “The Problems of Language in German Idealism,” p. 331. 50 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, p. 243.

Chapter 3 H E G E L’ S S P E C U L AT I V E S E N T E N C E : A N O N T O - G R A M M AT IC A L R E A D I N G O F “ L O R D SH I P A N D   B O N DAG E” Jeffrey Reid

I am honored to participate in the present Festschrift for Jere Surber and hope that my contribution may repay, in some small way, the great debt that I feel toward him. In many ways, it was his curatorial role in the Hegel Society of America’s biennial 2002 meeting, on the theme of “Language in Hegel,” that launched my academic career. Indeed, the inclusion of my early work on Hegel’s notion of scientific objectivity and language, in the HSA meeting and later in his edited publication on the subject for the SUNY Hegel series,1 not only gave me the confidence to pursue my linguistic reading of the German idealist but helped me make the shortlist for the post that I have now held for twenty years, at the University of Ottawa. It is somewhat ironic that my earlier work on language in Hegel concentrated on his notion of speculative language in its later, systematic, Encyclopedic extension, and that I have only fairly recently “returned” to the speculative sentence or proposition (Satz) as it first appears in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the subject of Jere’s groundbreaking essay in Hegel-Studien.2 Indeed, when I began working on language in Hegel, I judged the Phenomenology passage to be simply an early, rather inchoate attempt to express what would be later developed and refined in the mature system. More specifically, I considered the judgment (Urteil) form of the speculative proposition, as Hegel discusses it in the Phenomenology’s Preface, to be accomplished and thus more worthy of study in his more mature work, in the Logic and the Encyclopedia. There, we find the destiny of judgment realized in the perfected (vollkommene) form of the syllogism (Schluss), as articulated in the system itself. Happily, my latest work, which involves the examination of language forms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, has caused me to revisit Hegel’s early, pivotal text on the speculative sentence and Jere’s important commentary on it.3 Many of the features that Jere discusses in his “Speculative Sentence” article are fundamental to my own grasp of language in Hegel, generally: the ontological nature of judgment (Urteil), the psycho-grammatical nature of the propositional Subjekt, the distinction between names (Namen) or signs (Zeichen) and words, how the meaning of the predicate rebounds on the subject, and, perhaps above all,

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the metaphysical dimension that scientific (systematic) language necessarily opens onto. I would like to briefly retrace my own discovery of these elements as they arise in Hegel’s mature Encyclopedic writings and then revisit the “speculative sentence” passage in the Preface to the Phenomenology, as the passage pertains to my recent Phenomenological project. Proceeding in this way will allow me to introduce some new elements, which, building on the foundations explored in Jere’s 1975 article, further explore the onto-grammatical nature of Hegel’s speculative sentence and how its copulative space of ambiguous meaning has political purchase. To illustrate this, I will apply the onto-logic of the speculative sentence to the famous “Lordship and Bondage” text, a dialectic with clear political overtones. There, we will see how understanding the Subjekt as both a grammatical entity and as the expression of thinking consciousness implies the meaningful agency on the part of the predicated Other. In the early article that I referred to above, “Objective Language and Scientific Truth in Hegel,” I explore the question of objective truth inherent within the Hegelian system, as it is presented in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. I show how truth, in the systematic context, is not a matter of correspondence between language and a divorced, substantial reality, whether material or ideal. Rather, for Hegel, true scientific (systematic) objectivity takes place in the actual discourse of Science (Wissenschaft) itself. Such an idea of scientific discourse or logos relies first and foremost on a theory of language that we find presented in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit book of the Encyclopedia, which I discuss in my article. There, I demonstrate how the idea of objective language in Hegelian Science revolves around the distinction between the linguistic sign (Zeichen), i.e., the raw signifiers that Hegel also sometimes calls “names (Namen),” and, on the other hand, what he generally refers to as “words (Worten).” Thus, when, in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (section 464), Hegel writes, “The existence, as name, needs an Other, [i.e.] meaning from the representing intelligence, in order to be the significant thing [die Sache], true objectivity,” the “significant thing” that he is referring to is what he means by “word.” This claim is supported in the previous section, where we find that “names as such [are] meaningless words.” Although Hegel’s use of the terms is not always rigorous, signs (names or signifiers) are, for Hegel, predominantly natural, that is to say, immediate and largely arbitrary entities, arrived at through common usage, in the French sense of the term: being worn away into a current shape through the friction of use. Words are more substantial. They are, in fact, empty signs that have been invested with thought, “intelligence,” or meaning. Put briefly, thought invests linguistic signs (found immediately there) with meaning in order to produce words. Of course, words alone do not Science make. Rather, as meaningful entities, they take place in greater grammatical structures of significance: in sentences (propositions, judgments) and finally, in the ultimate Hegelian grammatical structure: the syllogism, which is the perfected (volkommene) form of what he calls the Concept. Anyone doubting the syllogistic outcome of the grammatical proposition should re-read the last sentence of the “Judgment” chapter of the Greater Logic: “By virtue of this fulfillment of the copula, the judgment form [a.k.a. proposition] has become

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the syllogism.” Understanding what exactly Hegel means by the “fulfillment of the copula,” in the Phenomenological setting, is the subject of my most recent work on the speculative sentence. I will return to the question of the copula below. For now, I would like to briefly revisit the notion of “fulfillment or filling (Erfüllung),” mentioned in the sentence above. The idea of “filling” obviously implies content, and this is a key aspect of Hegel’s notion of objectively true discourse, i.e., of the logos that he calls Science. If we take Science itself as the most perfected (vollkommene) form of the syllogism or Concept, then we must expect this form to be thoroughly fulfilled with content. Further, if we respect the grammatical foundation of judgment (Urteil) as the fundamental structure that comes to inform the systematic syllogism, then it becomes necessary to see how the syllogistic embodiment of Science derives its content from forms of judgment. Since the Encyclopedia itself espouses the syllogistic form of a universal moment (the Logic), a moment of particularity (Nature), and a culminating singular moment (Spirit), it should be apparent that the content with which this syllogistic structure is fulfilled is essentially discursive, i.e., made up of discourses that take place in the grammatical form of judgment and are meaningful within the system of Science itself. The content of Science consists of real words, invested with meaning (thought), through judgment, and therefore not merely consisting in arbitrary linguistic signs. What are the discourses that form the content of Science? The discourses of Science are the actual texts upon which philosophical thought reflects and which form its syllogistic content. The philosophy of history, for example, does not reflect abstractly on human time and events but rather on the actual historiographical texts that tell their story; the philosophy of nature does not reflect generally on the things of nature themselves but rather on the actual texts of natural science; the philosophy of religion considers sacred artistic expressions and doctrinal texts, etc. Of course, the question arises: what makes these constitutive texts themselves objectively true? Why Goethe and not Newton? The answer to this is fundamental. In Hegel, greater narrative structures confer meaning on the discourses that form the content of those structures. Ultimately, it is because, for example, linguistic expressions of law fit into the narrative of objective spirit, aka the narrative of Hegelian freedom, which, in turn, fits into the narrative of Spirit as a whole, that law constitutes an objective content of Science. Goethe’s chiaroscuro notion of color is more conceptually meaningful, within the Hegelian narrative of natural science, than is Newton’s fragmentary, analytic one. The relation between content and scientific form is reciprocal and organic, i.e., integrated and integral. While the systematic narrative confers meaning on the discrete contents, the discursive objectivity of those contents confers truth and objectivity on the grand narrative structure. Drawing a literary parallel, Mr. Darcy’s incidental comments on Elizabeth at the ball in Bath only become significant content in light of Pride and Prejudice’s carried-out narrative arch, which, reciprocally, would not be the same without the initial contretemps that Darcy’s comments occasion. For those who might worry that my literary example shows Hegel’s theory of truth to be overly “coherence” rather than

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“correspondence,” I would add that the empirical content of Science is nonetheless supplied by the discourses of the positive sciences (e.g., of nature) upon which Hegelian philosophy reflects. In a subsequent article, I explore Hegel’s ontological grasp of judgment,4 an idea that is again fundamental to Hegelian Wissenschaft, and which is another important aspect in Jere’s article on the Speculative Sentence. While the ontological dimension of Urteil certainly informs the onto-grammatical reading of the Phenomenology and the idea of hermeneutical openness that I will discuss below, the core idea is also present in other Hegelian contexts. Of course, “judgment” is a grammatical term that refers to a linguistic proposition (Satz), and, as such, presents a relation between the grammatical subject and the predicate through the copula “is.” The fulfillment of the judgment form by which the syllogism comes about, as expressed in the above-quoted passage from the “Judgment” chapter of his Greater Logic, takes place in the copula. This latter involves the “determinate connection” between the subject and the predicate, as Hegel writes there. In fact, the determinate nature of the copula, of the “is” between subject and predicate, bespeaks its accomplished existence, whereby it will become the mediating moment of particularity within the Hegelian syllogism. To illustrate this crucial point for the reader, allow me to refer to the purely formal (i.e., non-ontologically determined) logic of the best-known categorical syllogism. There, the determination according to which the particular species of “all men” falls under the general (universal) quality of “being mortal” allows the syllogism to arrive at its conclusion that Socrates, as a singular man, is mortal. However, in Hegel’s systematic Science, the syllogistic structure is fully ontological, articulating the movement of his famous Concept, according to which thought, in its indeterminate generality, determines itself in and through the particular moment of otherness, in order to be reconciled in the singular, holistic grasp of itself as having carried this determinate movement into actual being. The content of Science should thus be seen as arising from the different ways in which thought addresses its particular Other and recognizes itself therein. The fulfillment of this movement, whereby abstract self-identity is only realized through the organic grasp of mediating difference, is fundamentally carried out in the copula of the judgment form. The “ontological grasp of judgment” means taking the copula “is” as performative of actual being, an idea arrived at by conceiving Subjekt in both the grammatical and psychical acceptance of the term, as I mentioned above, a move that Jere explores in his “Speculative Sentence” article. In my earlier work, I arrive at this discovery by another route, by showing how, in making this move, Hegel is inspired by Fichte’s fundamental proposition for all Science, the famous “Ich bin Ich (I = I),” however as read through the interpretive lens of Hegel’s old friend, Hölderlin, in his short but foundational text “Urteil und Sein (Judgment and Being).” Fichte’s proposition or sentence (Satz), taken as the expression of the absolute I, does indeed express the self-positing (sich setzen) agency of subjective thought per se in the linguistic terms of a judgment, where “I” is Subjekt in both senses of the word. What Hölderlin contributes, in his short but pivotal text, which is a critical commentary on Fichte’s

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founding proposition, is the crucial idea that the copula, the “ = ” between the subject “I” and the predicate “I,” is not merely a statement of identity but always also an affirmation of difference. Otherwise, why have the copula at all? If the copula were simply an expression of pure identity, we could simply say “I.” Further, Hölderlin shows how it is through the interplay between identity and difference in the copula that existing, determinate Being arises. To be is necessarily to be both what is, and what is not, as Heraclitus had already remarked. That is precisely what “determinate” means and why it arises in the copula. Contemporary philosophers in what is referred to as “the analytic tradition” will doubtlessly find the idea that the grammatical copula has ontological weight either puzzling or downright wrong-headed. Even among those present-day readers who are honestly interested in Hegel and German Idealism, the ontological nature of judgment may still be unfamiliar and appear unlikely. Perhaps this is because of an enduring tendency to read Hegel as a neo-Kantian philosopher and thus to accept as conclusive Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God, in the first Critique, where he explicitly cautions against taking the copula as anything other than an empty sign of identity. And yes, Hegel’s Scientific take on the copula is indeed informed by its metaphysical use in the ontological argument, where the statement “God is Being,” to use the example from the Preface to the Phenomenology, which Jere discusses, does promote the “is” as the expression of the Absolute’s existing reality. My research into the extra-Phenomenological aspects of the speculative proposition shows that it is more than just an idiosyncratic element discussed over several pages of that work’s Preface, but informs Hegel’s entire systematic project. Looking at the ontological nature of judgment in a more anthropological, and perhaps more familiar way, it may be helpful to see Fichte’s first principle (I = I) as simply stating the factual reality of human subjective thought. Indeed, the fundamental intuition of the self-positing agency of thought, covertly at play in Kant’s notion of ideal causation in the province of moral reason (pace neoKantians), is shared by Hegel. Indeed, when students ask me about the nature of his idealism, I tend to express its fundamental principle in these terms: belief in the agency of thought. In other words, far from asserting that “everything is ideal,” Hegel’s absolute idealism rests on this core tenet. Thought has agency; in fact, thought is agency. Without this, the whole system is meaningless. But what does such agency imply and how is it “speculative”? First of all, we must accept that there is something called thought and that it is associated with selfhood. Second, we must accept that thought is not just a private calculative, passive feature of data processing but that it comes out of our heads, into the world, which it configures, determines, or, using Hegel’s term, negates, in a way that transforms its objects into something more thoughtful and more meaningful than what was initially and immediately found there. The agency of thought might be thought of as a kind of phenomenological intentionality, for readers more familiar with that vein of contemporary philosophy. Crucially, I maintain that, for Hegel, the agency of thought is performative in and through language as meaning. It is through the medium of language that

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thought determines its worlds and worlds become meaningful. How? Because when thought takes possession of linguistic signs to form words, its ideal agency becomes real and actual in the world. If asked for proof of the agency of thought, Hegel might simply have answered, “Spirit,” which we may translate as “the existing, self-knowing, humanly produced, historically developed, cultural reality of the world that we live in.” As the instantiation of thought, spirit must therefore be open to linguistic interpretation. The Phenomenology of Spirit recounts this development (of spirit), up to a reality that Hegel calls Science, which is subsequently presented, in its accomplished form, in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Whereas my earlier efforts dealt mainly with how the objectivity of language is meant to inform Science, my current work has dealt with forms of language that are involved in the development of spirit, as defined in the paragraph above. These forms or figures (Gestalten) present themselves throughout Hegel’s Phenomenological work. If language can be said, generally, to mediate our thinking relations to the world (through the agency of thought), and given that Hegel’s Phenomenology describes such relations in terms of consciousness, in terms of the relation between the thinking subject and its objects, then language must be involved in each of the forms of consciousness that are presented in the Phenomenological epic. It should thus be possible to discover and show how each form of consciousness involves and reveals itself as a form of language. In the Phenomenology, Hegel presents his notion of grammatical ontology in the “speculative sentence” passage, particularly in the sections (M59–66/W3, 56–62)5, the sections that Jere discusses in his article. Given the direct complicity at play between judgment and consciousness established there, the whole book can be read as a protracted commentary on these few but fundamental pages, a reading that I attempt in my Hegel’s Grammatical Ontology book. In order to grasp how such a reading is possible, we must understand how the speculative approach to the proposition (or judgment) brings about a dialogical reality within the copula itself. More precisely, we must see that the subjective determination undergone by the predicate (as substance) actually confers selfhood upon it, in such a way that now the predicate can be seen as subject and where what was formerly subject should now be seen as the predicate. This reciprocal, “speculative” predicative action is described by Hegel as involving a “Gegenstoss (counter-thrust),” wherein the “Subject has passed over into the Predicate (M60/W3, 57).” The thing is this: given the ontological nature of the subject-predicate relation, the speculative proposition constitutes its own grammatical ontology, observable in the way the copula is now conceived as the “harmony” of both identity and difference, or a “floating center (M61/W3, 59)” of meaning. In the speculatively grasped copula, as Hegel puts it in fittingly ambiguous terms, “we learn that we meant something other than what we meant to mean (M62).” In clearer terms, whereas the dogmatic, reflective proposition expresses the unilateral, opinion of the subject/self, which it imposes upon the predicate/object, the speculative proposition allows the predicate to speak for itself. The result is an ambiguity of meaning that takes place in the copula itself, in the ambiguous relationship between

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subject and predicate. This relationship is one where identity is fully enlivened by difference, and whose multiplication of meaning involves an essential openness to interpretation, which I refer to as hermeneutical openness. Further, the ontological nature of the copula, the performative reality of the “is,” carries over onto its level of speculative ambiguity and openness. Grasping the copula ontologically consequently allows us to conceive of its fulfillment in communal/societal realities, which display varying features of openness and “harmony” that result from the essential differentiation that arises within predicative self-identity. The progression recounted in the Phenomenological epic leads to the Absolute Knowing chapter, where Encyclopedic Science is deduced as a communal form of hermeneutical openness. Such a conclusion implies that the Phenomenology should be read as a series of attempts at communities of hermeneutical openness, a series that only makes sense in light of its achieved culmination in Science. Following Hegel’s argument, we can here anticipate the communal embodiment of such an ambiguously open, discursive reality, where the Scientific verb is fully at play, in the syllogistic form that I presented above as the onto-grammatical outcome of the judgment form in the syllogism. Of course, the logic of Hegelian narrative means that such an ending, in the fully speculative community, sheds light on and makes meaningful all the other figures that have led to its realization. The speculative community of hermeneutical openness evoked in the final Absolute Knowing chapter is nothing other than the state university (of Berlin), an admittedly surprising conclusion that I arrive at in my book, and which I cannot go further into here. The title of my new book on Hegel’s grammatical ontology includes the phrase, “Vanishing Words.” The phrase expresses a crucial feature presented in the “speculative sentence” section of the Preface, and which Jere presents in his references to the “loss” of the subject (Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” pp. 221–2). Essentially, “vanishing (verschwinden)” is what words do. First, they are spoken, written, expressed, and, as such, really are something. They exist in the world. However, they begin vanishing as soon as they are articulated or pronounced, an aspect that is easily grasped in the evanescence of the spoken word, whose sound evaporates into thin air. Although its perdurance may be more lasting, even the written word is temporal and finite. The pages yellow and decay; the parchment crumbles into dust. The manuscript is lost; the book is out-of-print. In today’s culture of the digitally configured word, the finite temporality of written language should be even more pressingly evident. More fundamentally, words are always past. They are read or spoken. Words are in time and, as such, are only for a time. Significantly, in Hegel, the vanishing of words confers on them an essential aspect of “having been.” I write “essential” because the truth or essence of things in general, and of words in particular, is revealed, in the Perfekt tense, in their “having been,” and thus through their vanishing or “loss,” as Jere puts it in his article. “Wesen ist gewesen,” to repeat Hegel’s mantra. Essence is what has been. Although the term “essence” may appear spooky and metaphysical, in the context of language and words, we can say that it simply denotes “meaning.” Thus, for Hegel, the meaning of things is revealed in

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their vanishing. Words are meaningful things (Sachen). The meaning of words is revealed in their vanishing, and captured in greater structures of meaning. Above, I mentioned how Hegel defines “words” over against linguistic “signs.” I said that words were signs invested with thought. The essential vanishing feature of words means that this investment is finite and temporary. Thought always outstrips the word in which it takes place, simply because words are always embodied in finite signs. The vanishing of the word, its quality of having been said, heard, written, read, etc., releases thought in the form of meaning. Briefly, the vanishing of words is a necessary condition for meaning. Meaning spills out of words that have been and are never definitive. Therefore, an essential condition for hermeneutical interpretation is the vanishing of words, leaving behind the empty signs that they invested (predicated) in the first place. Over against such vanishing, linguistic signs represent predominantly natural, finite entities that thought finds immediately there. And according to Hegel’s take on natural entities, they may “die” but their death is, in itself, without significance or meaning. Thus, signs may evolve over time. Hobbes may have written “wee” for “we” or “softnesse” for “softness” but as linguistic signifiers, these idiosyncrasies have no effect on the meaning. Meaning is a feature of words, which always outstrips them, spills out of them in their vanishing, and is never definitively set. In spite of their natural finitude or perhaps because of it, signs have a stubborn persistence. They change slowly and contingently over time, like mountains or glaciers. Linguistic signs, as Hegel writes in his report on state education to the counsellor Niethammer, are, in this regard, like so many “stones or coals” (W4, 415). What do vanishing words have to do with the speculative proposition? As I explained, the speculative way of looking at language, in Hegel, involves a reciprocity whereby the predicate is allowed subjective agency, and the subject allows itself to become the object of the Other’s predication. Since predication is that act through which signs are invested with meaning to become words, we can say that reciprocal predication brings about the constitution of words, which, as I also stated, are essentially vanishing. Further, as vanishing, words are outstripped by their meaning. Consequently, the reciprocal interplay of speculative predication brings about an ontologically determined space of ambiguous meaning, in the “floating center” that Hegel situates in the copula of judgment. The hermeneutical openness in the speculative copula depends on the vanishing of words, where meaning constantly outstrips their existence as past, as having been. And the vanishing of words implies the essential ambiguity of meaning, where the predicated Other is given voice, allowing hermeneutical openness to actually take place. The dogmatism that Hegel associates with representational language does not admit such reciprocity. The predicate remains the object upon which qualities are visited as accidents. The vanity of unilateral predication, whereby the subject jealously keeps predicative agency for itself, may indeed produce words but these are just empty reflections of its own subjective vacuity and, as such, are never really more than the arbitrary signs of its dogmatic assignment. The fact that dogmatism attempts to set “in stone” its meanings, according to its own exclusive predicative

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agency, to selfishly maintain them without admitting or even hearing the voice of otherness, reflects the ultimate status of its discourse as consisting of dead signs, dead letters. Dogmatism is indeed dogmatic. Such critical observations are not confined to the epistemological province. The ontological nature of the predicative rapport, as reflected in the performative reality of the copula, means that the discourse of dogmatism brings about worlds whose only substance is the background noise of ceaseless, opinionated chatter, and demagogy. The Phenomenology shows how such language-worlds, by the unilateral, nonspeculative nature of their identities, while generally harmless, are always in danger of collapsing into proto-fascistic communities that are exclusive of difference. Systematic Science, through the actuality of its hermeneutically differentiated copula, is meant to guard against such outcomes, both epistemologically and politically. In order to introduce or at least anticipate the political dimension of the speculative sentence, I will show how it can be discovered in a relatively wellknown section of the Phenomenology: the master-slave6 dialectic, as it appears in Chapter 4, on “Self-consciousness.” While I obviously do not have the space, here, to show how the ontogrammatical reading of the speculative sentence develops through the first three chapters of Hegel’s book, this development is indeed the case. To wit, Chapter 3, “Force and Understanding,” opens up language to interpretive otherness, to the fact that stating things “as they are” always involves recognition of what they are not, an ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) that is not arbitrarily accorded but rather, anchored in the predicative structure of language itself. Such ambiguity, involving an interpretive recognition of other listeners and speakers, is discovered in the form of judgment and the copula that arises in the “inverted world” section of “Force and Understanding.” It is this ambiguously speculative insight that is developed, deduced, or made “true” in Chapter 4, on Self-consciousness. There, the objective Other has been so predicated with the essence (meaning) of selfhood (thought) that it (the predicate) actually becomes another subject, and to be a subject is to speak one’s mind. Of course, as witnessed in the intrigues of the best novels, great stories often depend on misunderstandings, some of which are hopefully resolved, but only after a struggle, antagonism, and conflict, otherwise known as the plot. The same is true of the Phenomenology. Misunderstandings are not immediately resolved, like a pistol shot. Otherwise, the book would have been a mere pamphlet and there would be little to say about it. Self-consciousness presents the first engagement in the long struggle for mutual understanding between rivals that are both identical and different. As is the case with the best novels, or at least with those that encourage us to read to the end, the plot is only resolved in a much later chapter. The Phenomenology can be interpreted as a story about language itself, as it forms and performs different worlds and human ways of being in them. Thus, if we adopt a historical narrative and apply onto-grammatical forms of language to it, then the master-slave dialectic should be seen as a struggle for liberation that takes place in linguistic terms. Specifically, I want to put forward a reading in which the

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struggle for independence means leaving a subservient state of “being predicated as” to a form of self-predication or self-determination through judgment. In these terms, we may read the slave as initially a mere empty word or “sign” (Zeichen), entirely open to the master’s determinacy. However, following the onto-logic of the speculative sentence, such heteronomous determinacy will subvert itself in that it invests or predicates the slave with meaning and selfhood, making her something much more than a passive sign. In fact, her liberation involves becoming a meaningful word, a subject who liberates herself through her own linguistic performativity: she will herself determine signs, through predication, as meaningful words. Briefly, as a judging, predicating subject, the slave liberates herself from the status of empty, determinable sign and raises herself to the status of word. The master-slave dialectic is at the beginning of the struggle for mutual recognition, and its inscription into history, into time. There are many interpretations of this dialectical episode, as witnessed in Miller’s translation of the section as “Lordship and Bondage,” which thus seems to place the movement in the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Some contemporary American interpretations are distinctly nonhistorical. In my view, we can at least say that the dialectic is temporal, for the simple reason that struggle per se is something that unfolds, and consequently, must take place in time. Furthermore, when the temporal aspect is later recounted, in language, then it is de facto historiographical and thus historical. Before further exploring the linguistic dimension of the master-slave dialectic itself, it is necessary to refer briefly to the preceding paragraphs (M166 to M177/ W3, 137–44) in the “Self-consciousness” chapter. This text may simply appear as a sort of introduction or undercard to the main event, the title match between master and slave, but these preceding paragraphs are essential to understanding the main bout. That is because they engage a third term into the combat between the dialectical antagonists, an element that we can refer to as “natural life.” This natural element, which is introduced through a discussion of human sexual desire, plays a key role in the unfolding of the dialectic and in our grasp of language within it. More precisely, Hegel’s evocation of sexual desire allows us to also see how the human body, taken as “natural life,” can be presented onto-grammatically as a determinable, empty sign. Liberation will thus entail a form of self-liberation where the predicated body is invested with meaning, thus becoming a living word. This outcome must involve a process of self-differentiation through another self. Specifically, as an embodied living process, consciousness must reflect on itself as both self-identical and yet different, in and through another like itself: a living, conscious organism. Consciousness must find a way to satisfy itself as consciousness, i.e., to find itself and fulfill itself in the other consciousness. In other words, consciousness seeks to be conscious of itself in another self or to attain self-consciousness. However, here, at this opening stage, the other consciousness is configured strictly as a natural thing, as a “life” and therefore, we surmise, as a living body. This desire to be immediately at home in the other (bei sich bei anders) is what defines human sexual desire, for Hegel. The problem is that when “self-consciousness is [merely]

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desire (M174/W3, 143),” its satisfactions are ultimately unsatisfying, since, in sexual satisfaction, what is, in fact, experienced is the fact that “the object has its own independence (M174/W3, 143).” The result is the essentially persistent feature of desire (Begierde) generally: desire’s senseless, endless repetitiveness, its bad (natural) infinity. Consequently, consciousness’s attempt to know itself in the other as a natural life-form, through sexual desire, fails. Desiring consciousness “produces the object again, and the desire as well (M175).” Such blind, cyclical repetition and immediacy are features of Hegel’s idea of nature, in general, whose highest form of generality is the impoverished linguistic notion of genus or species. The ephemeral fulfillment afforded by the satisfaction of sexual desire, of knowing myself in the carnal knowledge of the other, is what Hegel means by “Selfcertainty,” in the heading to M166 (“The Truth of Self-Certainty”). The “truth” of the certainty of being at home in the other only unfolds through the twists and turns of the Phenomenological plot, where the fleeting, immediate, futile, and natural certainty of being sexually satisfied will be at least partially fulfilled in the moral (Protestant) community, evoked at the end of Chapter 6, in the last chapter on “Morality.” The first twist of plot is the master-slave dialectic, where the certainties of life and sexual satisfaction are thrown into question, a question that is not immediately resolved. In sexual desire, I attempt to liberate myself from my body by transcending it in the possession of the other’s body and the resultant satisfaction. This fails; satisfaction is always fleeting and desire recurs endlessly. The other’s body and mine remain singular natural things. I must overcome the natural heteronomy of my body in another way, a way in which it does not disappear in the transient moment of satisfaction, but rather, where it is maintained and preserved as full of selfhood. What the desiring consciousness seeks, in the “life” of its sexual partner, is really the “soulful” body, one where my body and that of the other are no longer empty, determinable, immediate, natural signs but meaningful words. The master-slave dialectic demonstrates how such an outcome can be brought about, not through the immediate “possession” or predication of the other, in sexual satisfaction, but rather through work and the habituation of one’s own body. This is actually what the master-slave dialectic brings about, in the form of the slave’s bodily experience of discipline and fear. Such habituation should be apprehended onto-grammatically. My argument rests upon finding in Hegel the idea that the body is a “sign” and therefore open to linguistic interpretation. First, recall that pure linguistic signs (or Namen), as such, are naturally formed, immediate, arbitrary entities waiting to be predicated and made meaningful by subjective thought. In order to read the human body as a linguistic sign, it is helpful to refer to the Encyclopedia’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, where, in section (s.) 431, Hegel presents the idea that intersubjective, self-conscious freedom can only be realized after the body’s immediacy has been “negated” by and invested with thought, bringing about a mediated entity that is beyond the purchase of desire. As Hegel puts it there, I must “suppress this immediacy in myself and thus give existence to my freedom.” The

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action, which preserves the body but now as an agent of freedom and no longer as purely natural, is presented in linguistic terms: But this immediacy is, at the same time, the bodiliness of the self-consciousness, in which it has, as in its sign and its instrument, its own self-feeling and its being for others as well as the relation that mediates it with others.

The same idea is found in M175 (W3, 143), near the end of the passage on sexual desire: Self-consciousness involves carrying out “this negation of itself in itself, for it is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is [viz. the negative or free].” Easier said than done! Negating the semiotic immediacy of my own body and investing it with freedom (selfhood) are thwarted when my body is immediately taken as an empty sign, ready for determinative predication by another. The investment of the pure linguistic sign with the “soul” of subjective thought takes place through the act of judgment, through predication, an act whose speculative ambiguity, as articulated in the interplay between identity and difference in the copula, is the arena where the master-slave struggle takes place. Their struggle should thus be understood as competing acts of predication, involving an oppositional encounter where “winning” means overcoming one’s status as pure body/sign and taking on the predicative agency of the soulful body or word. Here is how the struggle unfolds (M185/W3, 147 to M196/W3, 154), not from the elevated (Scientific/systematic) point of view, “for us,” but rather from down in the trenches, from the position of the consciousnesses themselves, engaged in the struggle. First, each consciousness is plunged into its own subjectivity. It has only itself as an object. It is certain of itself, but this self-certainty is not yet true. In other words, it has not mediated itself through another consciousness. The other is simply an individual, a life form. “They are for one another like ordinary objects, independent shapes, individuals submerged in the being of life (M186/W3, 147).” This relation is, of course, reciprocal, and recounts again what we saw in the earlier paragraphs on sexual desire. Each consciousness is, for the other, an “ordinary object,” a body as potential object of desire, and thus, an empty, predicable sign whose meaning is reduced to “object of desire” for the Other. However, consciousness, to be consciousness, must distinguish itself from that which confronts it, here, the immediacy of life in the form of the other consciousness. As essential negativity or pure restless selfhood, each seeks to negate what stands as objective to it. This is the meaning of the “trial by death (M188/W3, 149)” that Hegel evokes, the fact that each antagonist seeks the annulment (death) of the other, as an object, while at the same time presenting himself to the other as an object of annulment. In other words, each “stakes its own life” in seeking the “death” of the other, or, in our terms, each offers himself up as a predicable sign. What is truly at stake, here, is the relation that consciousness has to its own body. When I present myself to another consciousness, as an object, then I do so as a body/sign. Similarly, when I take the other as a natural, immediate object, I take

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him as a body/sign. In each case, what is not taken into account is the selfhood or meaning of the other or, in other terms, the other’s freedom. If, in the context of the master-slave struggle, we understand the body ontogrammatically, as a sign, then what I truly want in the dialectical confrontation with the Other is to get beyond my status of empty determinable sign (body) and be taken as a meaningful word. The problem is that, in the confrontation, I see the other as a mere body, as an empty sign, and therefore as a predicate that is simply a positing of myself, i.e., as something to be negated or determined according to my meaning. Such a position is deficient because it reduces the judgment (Urteil) to a proposition of empty self-identity, leaving no room for real difference. And difference is the essence of reciprocal recognition: I must recognize the other as being like me (free) in their difference. We might therefore take the tortured expression of Hegel’s speculative sentence or proposition as an articulation of the “trial by death” in the master-slave dialectic: Thinking therefore loses its fixed objective terrain (seinen festen gegenständlich Boden) when, in the predicate, it [i.e. thinking] is thrown back on to the subject and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself but into the subject of the content. (M62/W3, 59)

In the master-slave dialectic’s “life and death struggle,” each antagonist seeks to maintain their fixed terrain, whereby the other is determined as a simple sign that is ripe for predication; each seeks to annul the other as sign and fill it with the subjective content of its own self-identity. However, in doing so, each must present itself reciprocally as a determinable sign and thus “stake its life.” The grammatical/ psychical Subjekt of the judgment must also present itself as predicable, and the reciprocal nature of the confrontation means that the predicate must be allowed its speculative “counter-thrust.” Consequently, in positing itself through the predication of the other sign/body, each individual self presents itself as open to reciprocal predication. Such risk is the essence of dialogue, which reposes on the recognition of hermeneutical difference, within the recognized, shared framework of a struggle for meaning. In M188 (W3, 149) Hegel assures us that this “life and death struggle” must not actually result in the real death of either of the opponents. In that case, the survivor would be as dead as the object/body that is killed. Rather, the “death” is figurative because if one of the opponents actually died, there could be no subsequent reciprocal recognition. Onto-grammatically, we can say that the “death” of either (reciprocally determined) subject or predicate removes any possibility of either one attaining anything beyond the status of empty sign, anything like a meaningful word. On the one hand, we would be left with subjects of pure self-reflective “meaning (Meinen),” without any possibility of its linguistic expression. Such pure subjectivity, in Hegel, is identical to pure negativity or, we might say, to meaningless meaning. As such, subjectivity tends to consume itself in vain, mute self-feeling.7 On the other hand, we would have only the dead sign, devoid of any meaning and

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open to unilateral, dogmatic predication. Consequently, the actual removal (i.e., death) of either antagonist would imply that there can be no speculative sentence, no difference within identity, no actual meaning, no “freedom for argument (M62/ W3, 59),” and, thus, no philosophy, no Science. Such a fruitless outcome will haunt the more worldly, historical configurations that Hegel evokes in the later “Reason” and “Spirit” chapters. It anticipates Hegel’s diagnosis of his own contemporary situation, defined in terms of a culture of Verstand (understanding): on the one hand, subjective feeling; on the other, finite, meaningless signs, with each aspect underscored by the inert, paralysing negativity of skepticism. Of course, as we may already anticipate, such a world of skepticism, feeling, and empty signs (qua data) is one in which we might readily recognize ourselves. After all, the meaning of the dialectical encounter’s “fight to the death” is für uns. If indeed, as Hegel writes, consciousness learns that life is just as essential to it as selfhood (M188), this realization is nonetheless “for us” Phenomenologists and it is “we” who see how linguistic signs are just as necessary to logos as our bodies are to the constitution of dia-logos. However, in both cases, our body/signs must be ensouled with meaning, and in order to be meaningful, we must acknowledge the predicative agency of the other body/sign that stands before us. I will return to this, below. For now, let us return to the combat. Regarding our two antagonists, there is an initial victor and a vanquished. The vanquished is the consciousness who surrenders, who blinks first in the standoff where each contender risks their life. One consciousness, the story goes, chooses “simply to live,” or, put otherwise, to maintain his body’s submersion in the things of life. He is thus essentially dependent on the life that sustains him. Above all, he is tied to his body. As a thing among things, he is essentially “for another (M189/ W3, 150),” a determinable sign among signs. The other combatant is the independent consciousness, whose essential nature is to be “for-itself (M189).” He is not dependent, simply because, in the stand-off with the other, he has not blinked. He has continued to risk his life, which means refusing one’s bodiliness and becoming a pure negativity, pure selfhood, pure determinacy, pure meaning. The first consciousness is the “slave (or bondsman),” the second is the “master (or lord, ibid.).” It is important to see that the slave is subjected to the master not directly but rather because the master has shown himself to be independent of thinghood in general, whereas the slave, in his attachment to thinghood, has shown himself to be a thing. In other words still, because the slave is dependent on the world of things, he shows himself to be nothing other than a body, a thing among things, an empty sign among signs. Pure data, we might say, consumed by the master who is pure negativity or determinacy. In fact, the seeds of revolutionary reversal are already sown. As consciousness, the master cannot help but measure himself through otherness, and in this case, the otherness is the very world he has forgone, the world of thinghood, as inhabited by the slave’s immediate relation with “life,” in the form of worldly things/signs as pure objects of desire and consumption. In Hegel-speak, the master “mediates himself ” through the slave and his world, and thus derives his essence (we say, “meaning”)

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from them (M190/W3, 150). He derives his essential quiddity or “whatness” from being mediated through another consciousness who is submerged in “thinghood in general (ibid.).” So, ultimately, the master shows himself to be submerged in the very world he sought to escape, the world of immediate things/signs, as objects of life and desire. The master is simply a consumer of the things (data) that the slave produces, and as a pure consumer of things, the master is dependent upon them and therefore, in Hegel’s sense, a slave. “[T]he object in which the master has achieved his mastery has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness but a dependent one” (M192/W3, 152). What the master consumes is the thing as dependent. He thus shows himself to be, in truth, dependent. He shows himself to be essentially a body among bodies, a sign among signs, data in a world of data, the very position that initially characterized the slave. Recall that the master shows himself to be more willing to sacrifice his “life” than the other. This means withdrawing from his bodiliness, acknowledging the nothingness of his body as an empty linguistic sign. He does so because he wants to become what is left behind the sign: pure universality, pure selfhood, pure negativity, pure freedom and “death,” and, above all, pure meaning. Of course, in so doing, he is no longer dependent on his status of being a sign among signs and so, he no longer offers himself to the Other as a sign. His nothingness implies that he not only refuses all heteronomous determinacy but he, himself, becomes pure determining agency. Grammatically, he becomes the pure subject of predication. He is the master of meaning. The other, the slave, as remaining pure sign in a world of signs, can only be predicated. He is an object/body/sign ripe for predication. We might say that the master’s dominance has come to rely entirely on namecalling or negative branding. Put still another way, the master has reduced the slave to the status of data and that is precisely the “virtual” world in which the master finds himself living. His possession is thus reduced to the pure consumption of individual, empty “names” or data. After showing how the insubstantiality of the master’s position is dialectically nugatory, unstable, and doomed to fail, Hegel then turns to the slave to show how the reversal is experienced from their point of view (M194–6/W3, 152–4). There are two essential ingredients to the slave’s liberation: fear of death and the discipline of service, and both can be read onto-grammatically. The former aspect, the fear of death, represents the inner experience of pure subjective negativity. Consequently, this fear is not just some vague apprehension but rather the experience of “pure negativity,” “the absolute Lord,” “dread” that seizes consciousness and “shakes it to its foundation (M194/W3, 152).” It is a “pure universal moment,” and as such is “the essential nature of self-consciousness,” “pure being for-itself.” It is thus, for Hegel, pure thought or free determinacy. In onto-grammatical terms, the fear of death can therefore be understood as pure essence and therefore as pure meaning. Just as we can comprehend the slave’s fear as having been inspired or instilled in her by the master, we can read it as the experience of the very meaning that has been predicated into her sign/body by the subjective determinacy of the

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master. Speculatively, the fear of death allows us to understand how the meaning invested in the slave/predicate now rebounds ambiguously on the master as the performative counter-thrust of difference. By instilling fear in the slave/body/sign, the master has created a monster. The second essential ingredient for existential freedom is discipline qua work. Through work, the slave does not just experience her essential freedom as inner and universal (i.e., as the fear of death); rather, work is the exteriorization of that freedom into objectivity. In the object that she works upon, the slave recognizes the reality of her own freedom. Work also allows the slave to overcome the natural immediacy in which she was submerged. “Through his service, he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence … and gets rid of it by working on it (M194).” Hence, the worker/slave is able to recognize himself in the worked-upon object, in the same way that the artist can, in Hegelian terms, be said to recognize herself (i.e., her creative freedom) in the finished work of art. Whereas the object of desire and consumption (the empty sign/data) could only provide a “feeling of self ” and a “satisfaction” that is only “fleeting,” work “holds desire in check” and produces a form of freedom that is “something permanent (M195/W3, 153),” wherein, most importantly, the slave can recognize the substantial nature of their own freedom. It is crucial to realize that the fundamental “object” that the slave works upon, in order to accomplish any work at all, is their own body/sign. This happens through habituation (qua discipline), a process whereby the slave comes to predicate her own body, investing it, through practice, with the soul of selfhood, in order to make it a meaningful, active word. Such a positive reading of “habituation,” as a form of actual liberation, is presented in Encyclopedia s. 410. Whereas habit is often “referred to disparagingly,” in fact, habit is indispensable for the existence of all intellectual life in the individual, enabling the subject to be a concrete immediacy, an ‘ideality’ of soul – enabling the matter of consciousness, religious, moral, etc., to be his as this self, this soul, and no other, and be neither a mere latent possibility, nor a transient emotion or idea, nor an abstract inwardness, cut off from action and reality, but part and parcel of his being.

Consequently, fear of death and discipline can be comprehended as carrying out a self-liberation, where the slave is no longer an empty body/sign, heteronomously predicable, but rather as a self-determined, meaningful word. In the context of the master-slave dialectic, the slave’s liberation has taken place through the habituating work that the master has imposed upon him, first, the slave’s self-predication of his own body/sign through the habitual, even “proletariat,” self-disciplinary aspect of the work itself, which is necessarily repetitive since it must feed the never-ending appetite/desire of the master for singular things of consumption. Onto-grammatically, we can comprehend such work itself as an act of predication, carried out on the body and on other worldly signs, making them

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into words in which the worker may recognize herself (as free), as an ensouled body or meaningful word that speaks out. Reading the slave’s liberation in terms of the speculative sentence allows us to see how the slave’s self-predication represents a performative challenge to the master’s name-calling. Indeed, we understand how, today, the first step in any liberational struggle involves the critical refusal to allow the group that one identifies with to be named by the dominating culture, and conversely, to name oneself through an act of self-predication. Of course, the dominant culture often resists such challenges by referring to a unilateral determination of “history” or “tradition.” Similarly, the dominant culture often objects to the critical questioning or predicating of other established signs and symbols (statues, flags, celebrated historical figures, etc.) on the part of the “slave.” Significantly, the dominant culture’s greatest wrath is in reaction to the “slave” who dares to then turn its predicative powers against its former “masters” (“cis-gendered,” “colonizing,” “racializing,” etc.). Hegel’s masterslave dialectic, understood onto-grammatically, helps us appreciate the politically performative stakes involved in such name-calling. Further still, the new-found predicative agency of the slave’s body implies that it may now be taken as an actual agent of subversive change, “acting up” in significantly subversive ways (e.g., taking the knee, demonstrating, boycotting, etc.) that show its new status as a word and not merely a sign. For us, we can say that through her act of self-predication, the slave has shown herself to be no longer an exclusively subjected sign or predicate but a Subjekt, the one who signifies, the grammatical/psychical subject of judgment. In so doing, the slave has enacted the ambiguous reality of the copula, the speculative truth that it does not just express the unilateral self-identity of the master but that it must also represent a force of resistance, the linguistically performative counterthrust of difference, an enactment of ambiguity (Doppelsinnige, M180/W3, 146) that acknowledges interpretive openness. The “slave” is no longer as-signed as such, anchored and fixed in her nominal reality. No longer a mere sign, ripe for heteronomous predication, the slave has become a vanishing word, whose meaning is revealed by the fact that she no longer is what she is but rather, is what she has been, the history of her struggle. Of course, the happy ending that involves a community of shared meaning and reciprocal recognition that Hegel presents as the “I that is we and the we that is I (M177, W3, 144),” in a sentence that, significantly, alternates the grammatical subject and predicate (“we” and “I”) in a way that illustrates their speculative reciprocity, is not yet realized. There are other opportunities for grammatical misadventure. Indeed, we left the master submerged in an impoverished world of data/signs, a world of his own making, and hardly one open to the dialogue of reciprocal recognition that Hegel promised “for us.” Put differently, the master is a sign among signs, not yet a vanishing word. My brief tour of the master-slave dialectic has hopefully shown how the speculative sentence section of the Phenomenology, brought to light and examined by Jere in his 1975 article, has real purchase throughout the entire book. Further, the

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real performativity of the speculative sentence, i.e., the fact that, within the economy of Hegelian Science, judgment (Urteil) must be understood both grammatically and ontologically, allows us to appreciate the copula as an ambiguous, dialogical space for hermeneutical openness. Consequently, reading of the Phenomenology in terms of the speculative sentence is politically meaningful.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

Jeffrey Reid, “Objective Language and Scientific Truth in Hegel,” in Hegel and Language, ed. Jere Surber (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). Jere Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence,” Hegel-Studien, vol. 10 (1975): 210–30. Jeffrey Reid, Hegel’s Grammatical Ontology: Vanishing Words and Hermeneutical Openness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Jeffrey Reid, “Hegel’s Ontological Grasp of Judgement and the Original Dividing of Identity into Difference,” Dialogue, vol. 45, no. 1 (Winter, 2006): 29–43. I will refer to A. V. Miller’s translation, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), although sometimes modified. I will sometimes relate cited passages to the edition of Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. 3 [W3] edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), in order to situate the reader with respect to the German text. The page numbers of the Werke edition refer to the beginnings of the paragraphs in Miller’s translation. Miller’s translation of the struggle as that of “Lordship and Bondage” obscures the ancient, classical, pre-Christian aspect of “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.” See the chapter on Novalis in my book The Anti-romantic. According to Hegel’s diagnosis of the Romantic poet/philosopher, his death is death from “consumption” is the result of his self-consuming yearning. Sehnsucht becomes Schwindsucht.

Chapter 4 R E M E M B E R I N G T H E F U T U R E : F R E E D OM F R OM   S L AV E RY Jared Nieft

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes (renders) visible. Paul Klee, Creative Confession The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte This chapter attempts to explain why Plato’s Meno does not answer its central question: What is virtue? While the Meno, like all the Platonic dialogues, makes significant progress toward providing an answer, dispelling along the way many common misconceptions, the Meno is different in that it suggests a reason why it ends inconclusively. The reason, this chapter will argue, has less to do with the arguments of the dialogue than it does with a question that is not asked explicitly at any point in the dialogue itself, but that affects the whole of it: the question of slavery and its implications not only for Plato’s philosophy but also for Western philosophy as a whole. The chapter shows that Meno’s slave attendant, who appears midway through the dialogue and participates in a demonstration, devised and orchestrated by Socrates, is the physical manifestation of the question that Socrates must ask but cannot ask. The chapter further argues that this structural ambivalence is not unique to the Meno but is an underlying, possibly unavoidable, aporetic feature of Western philosophy. The Meno is divided into three parts. The first and last parts are organized around questions concerning virtue—e.g., what is virtue?; can it be taught or acquired through practice?; is it a native endowment or a gift of the gods?— while the middle part addresses the nature and origin of knowledge through an experiment involving one of Meno’s young slave attendants. The overall continuity and progress of the dialogue is abruptly interrupted by the impromptu experiment, which Socrates and Meno hope will demonstrate that knowledge is acquired not through learning or practice but through recollecting, again and for the first time, what has been lost, forgotten. Despite the success of the experiment, the dialogue

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ends inconclusively, with Socrates finally saying of virtue, “Then the result of our reasoning, Meno, is found to be that virtue comes to us by a divine dispensation, when it does come.”1 But the nature of that which comes as well as when it comes remains for the most part forgotten and unknown. The question this chapter attempts to answer is why did the dialogue end this way? Why did Socrates and Meno’s investigation end without an answer, especially in light of the slave boy’s success in recollecting a fundamental mathematical relation of Euclidian geometry, a truth born to him, a truth available to all?2 One possible explanation, as Plato suggests, is that Socrates asked the boy the right kind of questions, while the questions asked in the first and last parts of the dialogue, the questions related to virtue, were the wrong questions. What, then, would have been the right question, and why did Meno and Socrates fail to ask it? Plato continually stresses the importance of asking the right questions in the right way. In the Phaedo, for example, Cebes, who is recalling a proof for the immortality of the soul, says, “When people are questioned, if you put the questions well, they answer correctly of themselves about everything; and yet if they had not within them some knowledge and right reason, they could not do this.”3 Plato had great faith in the “examined life” because of its power to liberate the mind from prejudice and ignorance, and awaken the latent truth that each individual implicitly is for themselves and for others. This is also why he continually stresses the importance of dialogue because the truth is not born, if it is born at all, in isolation but in the company of others, in the context and drama of life. Ruby Blondell argues, “On a pedagogical level, the different kinds of individual interaction that Plato dramatizes pose various questions, including how such personal relationships may lead to transcendence of their socio-cultural circumstances.”4 Hence, the questions of Plato are rarely, if ever, abstract, and, even when they are, they still resonate with life and may lead to moments of transcendence, when the world is seen with new eyes.5 This is especially true in the case of the Meno, in which the dramatic and aporetic tension of the dialogue suggests such a breakthrough but Socrates and Meno do not successfully exploit the situation and precipitate the event of truth. They get the question wrong, and, if the dialogues are any indication, getting the question right is the most difficult thing of all. Plato famously dramatizes this problem in Book VII of the Republic, which depicts one man’s liberation from his enslavement not just to appearance but to the social situation that depends on his enslavement and his labor. Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, for example, argues that the “cave” is not merely allegorical but alludes to the historical mines of Laurion, which Athens exploited through the pervasive use of slave labor, both during and after the classical era. “It is in the mines, after all, where slave labor was extensively used and where prisoners—quite often acquired through war waged far away (i.e., ‘strange prisoners’)—were literally chained, working invisibly and unheard by the society for whom they labored.”6 The question Plato’s allegory asks is how to bring about the “turn” that will lead the slaves to philosophy and their liberation from ignorance and the physical conditions of their enslavement. They cannot see that there is a world of truth,

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light, and freedom waiting just behind them. What the liberator sees and knows as possible appears to them impossible, unknowable. The allegory’s answer to this dilemma is that they must be forced to turn and face the truth. Plato’s alternative answer, one that is strongly suggested throughout the dialogues, is that they must learn the art of questioning, of how to question what has not yet appeared or what has not been allowed to appear. This problem is especially acute in the Meno, not least of all because the question that needs to be asked, the question that might have made all the difference in the world, is not asked. It is not asked because it is not recognized as a question. It is not recognized as a question because it is too close, so close and familiar it paradoxically disappears in its appearance. The question they fail to ask is the question of the slave boy and what his presence signifies in the context of a dialogue about virtue. Part of the reason this question is so easy to miss is because contemporary readers are familiar with the Meno, its arguments and explanations, and the foreknowledge that they will ultimately be shown to be incoherent and contradictory, the product of pride and prejudice rather than wisdom. As Plato’s dialogues repeatedly show, familiarity leads to complacency, complacency to forgetfulness, philosophy’s two perennial adversaries. Plato reveals Meno to be both complacent and forgetful. Meno repeatedly forces Socrates to give examples and definitions that conform to his particular prejudices and expectations. Meno, for example, not wanting to do any intellectual work of his own, accustomed as he is to having others do what he should do, demands Socrates define shape after the manner of his teacher, Gorgias.7 Socrates complies, only to be asked to define color, again after the manner of Gorgias. Socrates’ ironic reply reveals Meno to be the exact opposite of what he seems to be, a lover of wisdom, for whom the question is everything and everything is at stake in the question. “How overbearing of you, Meno, to press an old man with demands for answers, when you will not trouble yourself to recollect and tell me what account Gorgias gives of virtue … Then would you like me to answer you in the manner of Gorgias, which you would find easiest to follow.”8 Meno is well educated and endowed with a strong memory but he lacks the will to strike at the roots of existence and know himself. Meno is shown to be just as forgetful as he is complacent, his forgetfulness most fully revealed in his basic indifference to the outcome of the conversation. As the dialogue develops, it becomes clear that he is not really alive to the questions he asks; nothing is really at stake for him. His questions are not born of real need or concern. His answers, like his questions, are not his own; they are the opinions and judgments of others.9 Meno has no meaningful inner life, no center; he is all outward show and appearance. He is beautiful, as Socrates remarks, but his physical beauty is only skin deep and hides the fact that he is empty inside. He is simply and tragically blank, and perfectly satisfied and unconscious in his satisfaction. He exemplifies the “last man” of Nietzsche’s Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in his contentment and self-absorption. He has no meaningful sense of who or what he is, let alone the modicum of concern, wonder, or terror to raise such questions. Even worse, he seems unaware that anything has been lost or forgotten.

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While it is clear why Meno cannot recognize the slave boy—he is after all Meno’s property—it is not clear why Socrates fails to see him. Socrates is the opposite of Meno; he lives a life of rigorous devotion to the questions of philosophy, so much so that the arc of his life is defined by them as well as by his ascetic abstention from easy answers, answers that may give comfort or sound promising but which have no lasting connection to the truth. He begins and ends his life in search of the truth, not an abstract, otherworldly truth, but a living truth capable of overcoming the pain and strife, illusions and injustices that endlessly plague human existence. But Socrates could not see that the truth he had spent his whole life searching for was at this particular moment, in Meno’s house, sitting with him, waiting for him. And yet, despite this, Socrates comes much closer to recognizing that truth—the implicit humanity and dignity of the boy—than Meno does, achieving by the end of the demonstration, almost in spite of himself, an ambivalent relationship to the boy and the truth he embodies. The demonstration happens in response to Meno’s repeated failure to define virtue and his mention of the paradox of knowledge, whereby it is equally impossible to search for what is known, since it is already known, or for what is unknown, since it is not known what it is that is searched for.10 The theory of recollection is Socrates’ profound answer to this problem, profound not because of its promise of absolute knowledge but because of its conviction that each individual already possesses and, in a certain sense, already is the absolute truth. That truth can neither be given nor taken away; it is the native inheritance of all. But, according to Socrates, it is forgotten amid the trauma of living and dying, the continual, unsettling, often frightening changes of being in time; of nothing being clearly what it is but instead appearing to be what it is not. This uncertainty is further aggravated by the unconscious ways we are false to ourselves and to one another, and the many and varied ways we misperceive and misconstrue the truth. In the case of the Meno, the problem is that the demonstration Socrates undertakes with Meno and his slave does not begin with a question; it begins with a command: SOCRATES: Just call one of your own troop of attendants there, whichever one you please, that he may serve for my demonstration. MENO: Certainly. You, I say, come here. SOCRATES: He is Greek, I suppose, and speaks Greek? MENO: Oh yes, to be sure—born in the house. SOCRATES: Now observe closely whether he strikes you as recollecting or as learning from me. MENO: I will. SOCRATES: Tell me, boy, do you know that a square figure is like this?11 The boy is not invited but commanded to appear—“You, I say, come here.” His coming does not really matter, “anyone” will do.12 Socrates’ repeated use of pronouns—one, you, he, him, boy—in place of his name serves to underline his lack of personal identity, which is further reinforced by the way Socrates and

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Meno talks “about” him, rather than “with” him, as if he were not there. Socrates’ intention to use him confirms his ontological status as one of Meno’s things. We never learn his name or his family history, which is customary practice among the ancient Greeks when introducing someone for the first time, only that he is “born in the house.” This is in striking contrast to the way Athena, in the guise of Mentor, is treated by Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, when she first enters his father’s house. Mentor, a stranger to Telemachus, is treated to the greatest possible welcome—“Greetings, stranger! Here in our house you’ll find a royal welcome”—and, after satisfying his need for food and drink, is invited to tell the story of his family and many adventures abroad.13 Telemachus does not perceive the divinity at work behind the appearance of the old man but his speech and behavior are fit for a god and he is afterward blessed by the goddess. No such blessing is granted Meno’s slave. There will be no homecoming for him, no epic story of his struggles and triumphs, of all that he has endured, suffered, and overcome, as there was for Odysseus and his family. And yet, the analogy between Telemachus and Mentor, Socrates and Meno’s slave, is appropriate, because, through the course of the demonstration, the boy is revealed as the embodiment of the truth that is at work through the play of the dialogue and Western history as a whole. The demonstration concludes with the slave boy recollecting a fundamental mathematical relation of Euclidean geometry, the Pythagorean theorem, and Socrates concluding: “But these opinions were somewhere in him, were they not? So a man who does not know has in himself true opinions on a subject without having knowledge.”14 Socrates then continues to speculate about what would happen if the boy were freed from his present situation and “allowed” to continue in this way: “At present these opinions, being newly aroused, have a dreamlike quality. But if the same questions are put to him on many occasions and in different ways, you can see that in the end he will have knowledge on the subject as accurate as anybody’s.”15 Meno begrudgingly accepts this conclusion, though he cannot and will not ultimately accept it, understanding at some level the genuinely revolutionary implications of the slave’s newly recollected knowledge. However, Meno still cannot help unconsciously implicating the boy in the world he is excluded from by his enslavement. In one of the early ironies of the dialogue, Meno inadvertently includes slaves in his working definition of virtue, implicitly attributing to them the qualities of temperance and justice in relationship to a capacity to “govern men.” Upon hearing this, a surprised Socrates asks, “Should a slave be capable of governing his master, and if he does, is he still a slave?”16 Meno immediately replies that this is not at all what he intended and the dialogue then continues as if nothing of consequence had transpired. Even Socrates, who is in no way calculating or desiring to harm or impede the boy’s progress, unwittingly reaffirms his enslavement at the moment of his liberation. Socrates is summarizing and restating the results of the demonstration when he, without provocation or reason, refers to the boy as “Meno’s boy.” “The professors call it the diagonal: so if the diagonal is its name, then according to you, Meno’s boy, the double space is the square of the diagonal.”17 In addressing him this

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way, Socrates fails to fully appreciate what has just happened and, in the process, reaffirms a regime of injustice and forgetfulness. However, Socrates’ ambiguous way of speaking about the boy in the aftermath of the demonstration reveals an underlying uncertainty, even ambiguity, about the boy’s ontological status. So if in both of these periods—when he was and was not a human being—he has had true opinions in him which have only to be awakened by questioning to become knowledge, his soul must have had this cognizance throughout all time? For clearly he has always either been or not been a human being.18

A straightforward reading of this passage would likely interpret “both of these periods” to mean two different lives, two different times, separated by a physical death. In the past life he was not a human; in his present life he is. This reading is confirmed by what Socrates says earlier: “And if he did not acquire them in this present life, is it not obvious at once that he had them and learnt them during some other time?”19 But Socrates unwittingly seems to be saying more than this. He seems dimly aware that something has changed, that the boy at the beginning of the demonstration is somehow different from the child at the end. In the beginning, he was just another anonymous slave but, in recollecting a truth, he recollected the germ of his humanity and, hence, himself. And in that moment of self-revelation and self-discovery something became available, again and for the first time: a future—his future. Unfortunately, his future is no sooner opened than it is closed when Socrates utters those terrible words, “Meno’s boy,” words which are not merely descriptive but performative, in that they serve to re-establish the boy’s status as Meno’s physical property.20 The terrible irony is that these words come from Socrates and not Meno. Once again, the question is why Socrates does not see or understand the boy for who he is. It is likely that the everyday presence of slavery in ancient Greece made it difficult for Socrates to see, let alone affirm, the boy’s humanity, his invisibility an effect of a commonplace reality: Socrates is used to seeing slaves in Athens; hence, he does not see them. Just as no one, when asked to describe the day’s events, would ever think to include the countless doorknobs successfully handled, Socrates forgets the boy as he is being used. The opposite is true of a child, for whom the commonplace reality of doorknobs, chairs and the countless other details, events and relationships of everyday life are anything but commonplace, the opening of a door, for example, being a momentous, almost magical, event for a young child first learning to open doors. But once a child achieves a certain level of mastery, the process gradually recedes into the background, becoming an inconspicuous fact of daily life. As Karl Ove Knausgaard, echoing Plato, suggests, “And like everything that the body uses regularly, from stairs to door handles … the particular chair, with its particular appearance, is lost sight of … It is as if we live in a world of shadows.”21 Socrates is all too aware of this process. That is why he continually, self-consciously

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strives to cultivate the naivety of childlike wonderment before a world that is often taken for granted, to see the world in all its uncanny strangeness, to attend to the unseen, neglected and forgotten, to avoid mistaking for a fact what is in fact an opinion or mere social convention. But in this case, Socrates fails to see the child before him and is unaware of him as he is of a household doorknob. Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century German philosopher, argues that long before we become self-aware, we undergo a complicated and painstaking process of socialization, where we are gradually adopted and adapted to a particular understanding of Being, one that cannot be directly perceived but that imperceptibly structures and conditions our experience and understanding of the world. Heidegger argues that for the most part we unconsciously act out this interpretation of Being—what he calls in Being and Time a “preontological” or primordial understanding of the world. It determines in advance not only what beings can appear but also how they appear. This preontological understanding cannot be directly perceived or questioned, rejected or affirmed, according to Heidegger, because we “are” this understanding and this understanding always already relies on elements indispensable to its reproduction through time, which cannot be formally recognized or included without invalidating the way of life they make possible. In the case of the Meno, Socrates can lay claim to himself as a lover of wisdom only by unconsciously disavowing the slave boy, thus implicating him in the questions of philosophy by excluding him. In other words, the slave boy is not allowed to appear as a philosophical question because he is an underlying, perhaps unavoidable, condition of Western philosophy. In other words, Socrates cannot ask the question of the slave boy because he is the material ground of his understanding and way of life. Socrates is thus complicit with a political view he vehemently rejects when it is advanced by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic—the view that moral values and the political communities they help establish and support, whether aristocratic, autocratic, or democratic, serve no higher purpose than to benefit and aggrandize the advantage and power of the stronger at the expense of the weak and vulnerable.22 Socrates unwittingly legitimizes this cynical, self-serving view, even as he consciously aspires to something nobler and more just. In the Meno, he is simply unaware of how he is benefiting from an unfair societal arrangement or how he, despite his best intentions and efforts, inadvertently condones and perpetuates an unjust situation. The real question, however, is whether or not Socrates, if he were apprised of the contradiction in his own thought, could ask, in a genuine and meaningful way that might alter not just the ideological but material dynamics of the situation, the question that is the void at the center of the Meno and, perhaps, Western philosophy as a whole. In other words, could Socrates openly question the meaning of Meno’s slave without bringing into question his own life’s mission and work, and the kind of time that makes such work possible? Plato acknowledges, even emphasizes, the fact that philosophy requires time to accomplish its work; time to think, read, talk, and write, time that is not otherwise obligated or invested, either in pursuit of physical pleasures or physical work. This other work must be performed by others, who not only reproduce the material

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conditions necessary for life but also the surplus time needed for philosophers to philosophize, which, according to Socrates, requires the separation of the soul from the body, the life of the mind being ultimately incompatible with the life of the body. Terry Eagleton, a British literary critic, states, “A professional caste of artists and intellectuals, as Marx recognizes, becomes possible only when not everyone needs to labour for most of the time … It is the fruit not only of labour but of exploitation and unhappiness.”23 Hence, the Platonic analogy links the philosopher to the divine, everlasting and otherworldly, and the slave to the body, which is fleeting, mortal, and fitted to serve.24 And yet, philosophy and slavery are unavoidably connected, the latter grounding the spiritual aspirations of the former. Thus, the question of Meno’s slave is the question that Socrates must ask but cannot ask—the boy being in some way the life and limit of philosophy. This seems to be in part what Jacques Derrida has in mind at the beginning of his essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” when he provocatively suggests, That philosophy died yesterday … that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future; all these are unanswerable questions.25

One way of seeing what is at stake in this passage is to substitute Meno’s slave boy for Derrida’s abstraction, “nonphilosophy,” and then it signifies something altogether more concrete and real: a child. Part of what makes the Meno so painful to read is that it is a child who is forced to appear, and that his coerced presence may not be by accident. The Meno raises the terrifying possibility that he may not be just a victim of circumstance but a casualty of history’s incorrigible logic, of masters and slaves caught in a never-ending struggle for recognition, the possible impossibility of which may be the animating aporia of Western philosophy, one that promises what it ultimately forbids. It is for this reason that Meno’s slave cannot truly appear in the dialogue, his truth withdrawing at the moment Socrates and Meno force him to appear. To that extent, Socrates is mistaken that what needs to be recollected in the context of their dialogue is the abstract form of virtue; rather, what needs above all to be remembered and “rendered visible” for the first time is the slave boy himself—he is the forgotten of recollected life. However, because he has never been seen or acknowledged in the past, he is not part of a past that can be recollected in such a fashion. For this reason, the central problem of the Meno is not, as Socrates argues, the problem of recollecting the truth of the past but of remembering the future, not the future of promise and possibility but the future of a past that refuses to pass into the past. This nameless boy, this child of philosophy, is not so much Western philosophy’s past as he is

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its future, cast into a time that can neither be anticipated nor mastered, forgotten or remembered. He exists between a future, in which he has no future, where the future signifies a mere continuation of the forgetfulness of the past, and a time in which he is the future, the messianic dimension of time that promises the impossible: his “second” coming. This temporal indeterminacy originates from the fact that he inhabits two different worlds, two different times, existing at the point of their violent crossing, between a forgotten, disremembered past and the light and promise of genuine community; the possible impossibility of this other future is born of the contradictions of human history. The German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, was one of the first to become aware of this contradiction in human history and, apart from the final conceptual moment of his Phenomenology of Spirit, the possible impossibility of its resolution in time.26 If, as he argues, the human reality only emerges in the desire for human recognition, and human history is the history of misrecognition, of masters and slaves, then Meno’s slave boy is not merely an accidental, collateral effect of human history but a symptom of an arche-violence that is the life and limit, spirit and destiny of Western thought. If Hegel’s Phenomenology is deprived its final moment of Absolute Knowing—i.e., the universal recognition and realization in time of each individual’s inalienable dignity and worth—it becomes a phenomenology of ghosts, the slave boy being the visible manifestation of the spirit that continually haunts and frustrates the progress of Western philosophy, growing in strength as the Phenomenology progresses toward its consummating act: the unleashing of spirit from the confines of history. Meno’s slave is nothing less than the overcoming of philosophy by spirit, of history by its ghosts. Hegel acknowledges as much when he prophetically asks, But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.27

After a history of forgetfulness, the “victimized” and “unrecognized” involuntarily arise as an unanswerable question, revealing that a whole way of understanding and being in the world is at stake and that the action demanded is nothing short of revolutionary and will only happen when it becomes a matter of life and death, perhaps when there is no longer any choice. And yet, despite the possible impossibility of asking, let alone answering, this question, it must be asked— because he is still waiting …

Notes 1 Plato, Meno, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library 165 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 100b. 2 Gregory Vlastos argues that Plato understands the slave as only capable of true belief (doxa) but not a rational account of why the belief is true (logos). “He can learn

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by experience (empeiria) and external prescription (epitaxes). But he can neither give nor follow a rational account.” If the slave were endowed with logos and true understanding of the Forms (eidos), he would cease being a slave and become a philosopher. The fact that he remains a slave at the conclusion of the demonstration means he still lacks understanding of the underlying Form, in this case, of “square,” “diameter,” or “diagonal,” even though he recollects the answer to the problem of how to double the area of a square. See Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 50, no. 3 (May, 1941): 289. 3 Plato, Phaedo, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 73b. 4 Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3. 5 The Parmenides is an example of a dialogue of “pure thought,” seemingly abstracted from and indifferent to human affairs. However, as Alain Badiou shows in Being and Event, the Parmenides has profound political as well as philosophical implications. The central dilemma of the dialogue, between the being of the one or the multiple, ultimately becomes for Badiou a question of who counts and who does not; who belongs and who is excluded from belonging. See Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 1995), p. 27ff. 6 Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, “Slavery in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and the Militant Intellectual from the Global South,” Theater Survey, vol. 58, no. 1 (January, 2017): 86. 7 Meno, 75a–76d. 8 Meno, 76b–c. 9 Jacob Klein argues that Meno’s memory is fundamentally “deranged,” his soul lacking the “depth” and “solidity” of one who is truly alive to philosophy. Meno recollects opinions, not knowledge, because his questions reflect the “surface character” of his life and commitments. See Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 188–9. 10 Meno, 80d. 11 Meno, 82b. 12 In fact, not just “anyone” will do. Socrates chooses Meno’s attendant because he is uninitiated to mathematical reasoning. He needs and requires someone without knowledge, who has had no formal learning for the demonstration to work. In other words, he needs a slave in order to demonstrate a philosophical truth. See Meno, 85e. 13 Homer, The Odyssey, 144–370. It is important to note that the idea of hospitality in fifth-century Athens differed from the Homeric ideal. Matthew Christ, for example, shows that Athenians were decidedly more reserved toward strangers, and less welcoming and hospitable toward those who were not kith and kin. Christ understands this development to be a consequence of the rugged individualism valorized in Periclean Athens. See Christ, “Helping Behavior in Classical Athens,” Phoenix, vol. 64, no. 3 (Fall-Winter, 2010): 254–90. 14 Meno, 85c. 15 Meno, 85c. Despite Vlastos’ argument that Plato does not think slaves are endowed with logos or nous and are therefore incapable of true understanding, it is clear in the above passage that, while the slave boy has not yet grasped the “underlying general truth,” he could have and, given the chance, “will have” such knowledge. See Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” 9fn. This line of interpretation, however, misses a more

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21 22 23 24 25 26

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fundamental fact: in this situation the slave boy is the truth and, if anyone is incapable of knowledge, it is Meno, who is the exact opposite not only of Socrates but of the slave boy. Meno, 73d. Meno, 85b. Meno, 86a. Meno, 86a. J. L. Austin, for example, argues that there are speech acts, which change the social relations or “state of things” they describe. For example, speaking the words “I do” in a marriage ceremony formalizes the couple’s relationship, in much the same way a judge’s pronouncement of “guilty” immediately changes the ontological condition of the accused. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Karl Ove Knausgaard, Winter, trans. Ingvild Burkey (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), p. 38. Republic, 338c–9a. Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 44. Phaedo, 66c–e. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 79. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that human history is the history of masters and slaves caught in a life and death struggle for recognition and, after a history of misrecognition, history ends in humanity’s emancipation from the master and slave’s dialectical relationship. What is significant in Hegel’s account is that he sees and understands the slave as the inner truth of Western history, a truth that must be confronted and properly understood, if history is to overcome its inner contradictions and fully realize its underlying ideals, ideals which were first outlined and pursued by Socrates and Plato. Hegel is one of the first to recognize that it is the slave that is the engine of human history, creating over time the material and conceptual conditions necessary for genuine recognition. For a penetrating and accessible analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, one that highlights the existential and social implications of his philosophy, see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), Chapter 2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), p. 21.

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Chapter 5 F R E E D OM A N D T H E L I N G U I ST IC T U R N I N K A N T ’ S C R I T I QU E OF J U D G M E N T Frank Schalow

With his celebrated Copernican revolution, Kant initiated a transcendental turn in philosophy. But is there a trace of a “linguistic turn,” which follows upon the methodological innovations that he pioneered? In this chapter, I will consider whether the emphasis that Kant places on the sensus communis, on the “communicability” of aesthetic experience in the Critique of Judgment, points to an underlying concern for the practice of language, which implies a deeper appreciation of its usage than is presumed in a simple model of predication. When viewed in this light, the Critique of Judgment provides an important inroad to the problem of language, the concealment of which yielded a foothold for Kant’s subsequent critics, including J. Herder and G. Fichte to raise the question as to the interdependence between language and consciousness, communication and meaning. In this way, I will offer another perspective on whether a germ of a linguistic turn begins to emerge prior to the rise of German idealism in the nineteenth century, a controversy that Jere Surber was among the first of his contemporaries to address. In the process, I will engage one of the key aspects of Professor Surber’s scholarship concerning Kant’s lack of providing a “Sprachetheorie.” As Surber states in Language and German Idealism: “In no way does Kant envision any Sprachtheorie as relevant to properly ‘transcendental’ issues.”1 My chapter will be divided into four parts. In the first part, I will raise the question of the dormant yet pivotal concern for language, insofar as it impacts the development of Kant’s philosophy beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason. In question is the ability to express the self-reflexivity of Kant’s entire enterprise, particularly as enacted through the critical “tribunal” by which reason demarcates its boundaries (Grenzen) and mediates the primary disputes of metaphysics. In the second part, I will show how Kant broaches the concern for “meaning,” thereby leaving open the possibility of a figurative or symbolic discourse as an alternative to the model of predication. In the third part, I will show how this opening enables Kant to consider spiritual and religious concerns as “meaningful,” in a way that diverges from David Hume’s empiricism. In the fourth part, I will show

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how these multiple angles for addressing language converge in the third Critique, particularly in Kant’s account of the “communicability” of aesthetic experience and his recognition of language as a form of “practice.”

I Kant’s Critique of Judgment continues to be one of his most enigmatic, challenging, and rewarding texts. But there was also a time, with regard to the study of Kant’s philosophy in the United States at least, when scholars downplayed the significance of this work, concentrating instead on the importance of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Perhaps we should not be surprised that as the third of the three Critiques would attract less attention, if only on the basis of chronology. As a young undergraduate at the University of Denver, I found myself in this difficult situation of trying to decipher the seemingly impenetrable passages of the Critique of Judgment, while enrolled in an “Independent Study” of that work (circa 1976). I recall floundering, trying to piece together loose interpretations of various passages, as I sat across from my mentor and teacher, Professor Jere Surber, as he acknowledged that we seemed to be entering into uncharted waters. He had recently peaked my interest in the question of language by giving me a reprint of his newly published article, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence.”2 In our Independent Study he both inspired and challenged me to wrestle with the most difficult philosophical texts. At that time, of course, the third Critique was discounted in most of the scholarship on Kant’s thought, at least within English-speaking circles. Within the complex tapestry of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the third Critique can easily be viewed as an afterthought. The simple order of chronology suggests as much, insofar as the Critique of Judgment appears as the last of three inquiries. This depiction is reinforced by the fact that in the third Critique Kant seems to tie up loose ends, emphasizing its lack in circumscribing a determinate objectdomain, within the realms of either theoretical or practical reason. But could the third as “last” entail just the opposite, as much a consummation and completion, as merely a final resting place whether otherwise unresolved issues of the Critical philosophy find their ultimate resolution? As much as we consider the discussions and arguments that shape the third Critique, we can also address how it fits within larger compass of Kant’s Critical philosophy. And this may become especially important if we manifest a measure of skepticism as to the grounding of that enterprise. In advancing a “meta-critique” of Kant’s enterprise, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder raise questions of this ilk, pointing to an overriding enigma that will also preoccupy German idealism.3 What is the mode of expression that is enacted in reason’s selfexamination, prior to and beyond the predicative model of discourse that Kant utilizes through his transcendental employment of the categories? Can the third Critique speak to this issue, if not directly through its arguments, then perhaps indirectly through the example of Kant’s manner of inquiry, through a circuitous way of addressing the basis of human subjectivity and its capacity for communication?

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As Dennis Schmidt suggests, while Kant may not have “thematized the question of language,” he indicated the “problematic relation between aesthetic experience and language in general.”4 When viewed historically, the omissions that Herder first identified do not simply end all rebuttals, but instead fuel deeper questioning and open new paths of inquiry. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger coined the expression “unthought” (das Ungedachte) to address the attempt to uncover a given thinker’s presuppositions and a point of departure for raising new questions. In the late 1920s, Heidegger came to prominence by challenging the standardized, Neo-Kantian interpretation of Critical philosophy through his controversial book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.5 Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with transcendental philosophy not only profoundly influenced his own philosophical development, but also shifted the horizon for reinterpreting Kant’s thought in terms of its hermeneutic implications, that is, in connection to concerns for meaning (Sinn), human finitude (Endlickheit), and the temporal ground of selfhood (Temporalität). Subsequently, Heidegger begins to forge many of his provocative insights into the nature of language by countering Herder as one of the forerunners in the attempt to explore the human capacity for speech. Heidegger’s appeal to Herder, on the one hand, and his allegiance to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, on the other, suggest that there is a passageway which is kept open, a possible detour, as it were, to embark upon an inquiry into language that circumvents or goes around German idealism.6 Taking a clue or hint (Wink) from Heidegger, we might consider whether a text that is a tribute to the past like the third Critique can harbor insights that can be retrieved from the future.

II Spearheaded by his Copernican revolution, Kant sought to encapsulate all the problems of philosophy into one simple question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” Indeed, few philosophers before or since have been able to use such a simple economy in order to zero in on one philosophical perplexity. Without going too far afield, the development of such a synthesis requires the application of transcendental conditions of knowledge. Yet, borrowing from Greek etymology, the allusion to such a synthetic unity betrays an implicit reference to the gathering and joining that implicitly occurs in language as logos7—an observation that does not go unnoticed by Heidegger, for example.8 Judging involves a synthetic act, which in its grounding also implies an aspect of articulation and expression. But how can we make this linguistic dimension explicit, if for the most part such synthetic a priori judgments are confined to a determination of the object, and thereby the mode of expression is wedded to, if not predefined by, a corresponding objective-discourse? Can we identify examples within Kant’s Critical philosophy that may not be restricted to an object-discourse, but instead emerges on a front where new meanings can be engendered other than what can be defined strictly

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through the use of predicates or categories? We must contrast the sign with the signified, the meaning (Sinn) with the referent, the connotation with the denotation. If we consider language to be a form of practice, as a medium of conveyance, then its usage involves the development of new distinctions. Even the cognitive determination of an object, insofar as it is a priori, entails a form of pre-determination, that is, the development of concepts such that a new precedent of usage is established for them, e.g., as a set of predicates. These predicates, as potential determinations of an object, acquire the power to signify something objective; through their derivation from a common ancestry or root new distinctions arise that bear a commonality. I have in view the role that time plays in providing a common origin, a grammatical root, as it were, in which new distinctions can be forged. As the pure concepts of the understanding acquire a determinate content, they can then signify what can appear within possible experience, and forge a vocabulary by which the articulation of human knowledge becomes possible. The common ancestry of time allows for a synonymy of meaning or a new cluster of similar connotations to arise. Transcendental imagination generates the schema for each pure concept, eliciting those distinctions that bear temporal connotations, e.g., “permanence” (substance), “presence” (existence), and “succession” (cause and effect). In this way, the transcendental schemata develop a distinctive vocabulary that delineates the content of the categories and allow for the synthetic unity they prescribe to be articulated in the form of synthetic a priori judgments. A distinctly nuanced temporal lexicon thereby arises.9 This lexicon, however, is not arbitrary. Insofar as time is the form of all human awareness, and is common to all human beings, to human cognition as such, the temporal lexicon implies a universal grammar of usage. To be sure, Kant does not explicitly arrive at this linguistic characterization. But through his Copernican revolution, he is setting up a new paradigm for human knowledge and the grounding of the knower within the dynamism of experience. Additionally, Kant’s legendary Copernican revolution shifts the fulrum o knowledge to the finitude of the knower. The Copernican revolution establishes a new orbit within which all that can be known resolves and through which the transcendental imagination can become the medium to transmit precisely those determinations that define the possibility of an object. In a Humean universe, the meaning of predicates is attached to perceptual units, e.g., simple and complex impressions, where the vehicle thereof is primarily ostension. The Copernican revolution completely overturns this model, not only of knowledge but also its manner of expression. Instead, what is knowable, and emerging as a corollary for a distinctively temporal vocabulary, is the “contextualizing” of whatever can qualify as an object, e.g., according to “possibility experience” or circumscribed within the realm of “nature.” The mapping of the pure concepts onto time also reciprocally delimits and demarcates a realm of knowledge, in which objects can appear, be known, and definable through a temporal lexicon. The “possibility of experience” establishes this sphere of knowledge, or, in linguistic terms, a context in which

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the temporal lexicon becomes applicable and its vocabulary meaningful. In the Kantian doctrine of schematism, a trace of a “linguistic turn,” as embedded in his transcendental turn, becomes evident.10

III Is there another example by which we can bring this dimension of language to the forefront and suggest that there is a “linguistic turn” that follows from, albeit only implicitly within, Kant’s transcendental turn? To answer this question, we need to consider another facet of his Critical philosophy where the emphasis on the determination of objectivity, whether in the theoretical or practical domain, recedes, and a complementary concern arises as to how language can embody other possibilities of expression in order to serve the ends of reason. I have in view the need for reason to circumscribe its own boundaries and thereby implement its power for self-criticism and self-reflexivity. This complementary practice, if we can call it that, for appealing to the selfcritical power of reason instantiated in all of us, seeks to express in the language of what is singular, that is, through illustration and example, a universal concern relevant to us all: namely, our humility before the highest of all human aspirations. The solution of the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique in determining the objectivity of physical objects requires a further, complementary argument, in order to secure the boundaries of human knowledge; the boundaries between what is knowable and what is unknowable must be demarcated according to principles that are ascertained by reason alone. Only in this way can Kant counter the presumption of David Hume’s empiricism, namely, the negative thesis that cannot be ostensively denoted (via perception or sense-experience) is not only unknowable, but also irrelevant and literally meaningless.11 As Kant states toward the close of the Critique of Pure Reason: “The celebrated David Hume was one of those geographers of human reason who have imagined that they have sufficiently disposed of all such questions by setting them outside the horizon of human reason—a horizon which he was not yet able to determine.”12 Here we discover that the debate between Kant and Hume hinges as much on the role and capacity of language to preserve as meaningful what is objectively indeterminate, rather than merely an epistemic divergence concerning the foundations of knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant, unlike Hume, faces a quandary. If the signification of predicates is reserved to determining the objectivity of physical objects, how, then, can we render meaningful that which is otherwise unknowable. In other words, there must be a language that allows us to speak beyond the model of predication, and yet be consistent with the linguistic norms implied in, and embodied by the synthetic a priori principles that are enunciated in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant recognizes the danger of conceding the homogeneity of linguistic conventions, and the hegemony they may imply for other areas of human concern

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and aspiration, for example, the relevance of religious or spiritual concerns and discussions. How can we communicate whether there is a higher human destination? Reason must be able to demarcate its own boundaries, and convey the difference and heterogeneity between what is knowable and the unknowable, or, in Kant’s terms, the phenomena and the noumena. The tension of this difference allows reason to survey the entire horizon of human knowledge, and thereby points to our own finitude as the origin of the context in which even the vocabulary for expressing predicative statements, and by extension, or through their use, the grammatical norms to convey the entirety of this transcendental landscape. For Kant, the transcendental ideas offer the key to extension of this linguistic practice, or for the inscribing in language reason’s capacity to communicate. The demarcation between what is knowable and what is unknowable illustrates, or provides a graphic portrayal, of how through the use of the transcendental ideas reason can demarcate its boundaries. The use is a kind of linguistic practice, which, while not confined to the cognition of physical objects, nevertheless can be instructive as to how what is objectively indeterminate can now be meaningful. Kant provides a brief summary of this possibility in his “Conclusion” to the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.13 In his discussion, he shows how what is apparently a negative prohibition of reason in precluding knowledge of supersensible objects reverts into a positive apprehension that a distinctive sphere of relevance is opened up by marking the tension between phenomena and the noumena. As Kant remarks, “Such is the end and use of the natural predisposition of ours, which has brought forth metaphysics as its favorite child.”14 Later, in the same section of the Prolegomena, Kant remarks: Experience, which contains all that belongs to the sensible world, does not bound itself; it only proceeds in every case from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned thing. Its boundary must lie quite without it, and this is the field of the pure beings of the understanding. But this field, so far as the determination of the nature of these being is concerned, is an empty space for us; and if dogmatically determined concepts are being considered, we cannot pass beyond the field of possible experience. But as a boundary it itself something positive … it is still an actual positive cognition which reason only acquires by enlarging itself to this boundary ….But the setting of a boundary to the field of experience by something which is otherwise unknown to reason, is still a cognition which belongs to it even at this point, and by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor strays beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the knowledge of a boundary, only limits itself, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is contained within it.15

By opening up this sphere of relevance, Kant gives license to other possibilities of expression that play upon this heterogeneity, for example, religious discourse or a universe of symbolic imagery that takes as its precedent of usage a counter-reference to what is not objectively determinate. The interposing of this “not” does not merely have a negative function, but instead becomes a “place-holder” for opening up a space of relevance beyond the one-dimensional cognition of physical objects.

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IV How, then, can there be a mode of expression that is not based on a distinctive object-domain, either of theoretical or practical reason? Couched in this question is an implicit concern as to the kind of linguistic practice that occurs without relying on an object. Such is the issue that Kant broaches in his Critique of Judgment. But there is also a converse issue that arises, which may or may not be as explicitly treated, namely, where does his account of such a way of speaking (sans an object-domain) stand in relation to the greater enigma as to whether there is a linguistic grounding to his Critical philosophy overall? That enigma may in turn mirror another, namely, how the human subject is to be conceived who is capable of engaging in speech and communication. As mentioned at the outlet, the third Critique is an enigmatic work. Many of the keys to unraveling its enigma reside in the “Introduction.” And herein lies another mystery: Kant actually wrote two introductions, as I would discover from Professor Surber in my Independent Study with him back in 1976. What came to be called the “First Introduction” was an initial “draft,” which in part because of its size gave way to a shorter and more succinct version that would ultimately be published with the text comprising the Critique of Judgment.16 In retrospect, the “Introduction” that was then published in the Critique of Judgment appears something as an afterthought. Nevertheless, both introductions address the role that the third Critique plays as an architectonic linchpin joining the theoretical and practical sides of the Critical philosophy. Theoretical and practical reason establishes two different legislative realms or domains, pertaining to nature and freedom, respectively. We can characterize each as two distinct domains of jurisdiction.17 Each in turn has its distinctive set of objective principles, implying a discourse that enunciates objectivity in else. Such an objectively based discourse amounts to what Kant calls a “determinate judgment.” But what if there were a discourse that was not restricted beforehand by a connection to objectivity, on the one hand, but, on the other, could advance a claim, for example, soliciting universal assent, for example, in estimating the beauty of a work of art? In such a case, the discourse, while “subjective” in one sense, would nevertheless seek a maximum agreement (among all participants in such an aesthetic experience). Kant then distinguishes a “reflective judgment” of taste from a determinate judgment.18 A judgment of taste may be personal on one level, but on another requires the possibility of agreement with others. A determinate judgment depends upon a “concept of an object” to establish the basis of agreement among “all possible objects,” as Kant makes clear concerning an objective cognition resting on the principle of causality. A reflective judgment refers back to the interplay of the subject’s cognitive powers, e.g., of understanding and imagination, rather than to a corresponding object. To quote Kant: “… since the freedom of imagination consists precisely in the fact that it schematizes without a concept, the judgment of taste must rest upon a mere sensation of reciprocally animating of the imagination in its freedom and of the understanding with its lawfulness ….”19 In the case of an aesthetic judgment, a distinctive sense of awareness, e.g., the eliciting of the

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sensation of pleasure, defines the subjective character of the experience. The subject’s stirring of its cognitive powers, of their harmonious interplay, implies a common ground—if only by virtue of their possession by all possible subjects. But unlike a determinate judgment, there is no grounding in self-consciousness, in the guise of the transcendental unity of apperception, which serves as the counterpole to objectivity. As a substitute if not a proxy for the transcendental unity of apperception, what can provide the common basis on which the potential for agreement can occur? Language grants the capacity for a subject to have an aesthetic experience that is not strictly “subjective.” The interplay of the cognitive faculties in an aesthetic experience provides a common ground on which a sensation, namely, pleasure, as corresponding to the aesthetic experience, can be conveyed. Because that correspondence cannot be “determined” by a prior concept of an object, the aesthetic experience is only “reflective,” that is, as pertaining to the concordance of the individual’s subjective faculties. The concordance, however, would itself remain mysterious or inscrutable without the “something else” serving as a “proxy” for its expression. Kant appeals to the sensus communis as this explicitly linguistic dimension requisite to convey the pleasurable sensation of the aesthetic experience, to ensure its communicability, and thereby provide a subjective corollary for the common ground of the aesthetic experience minus an explicit reference to an object. As Kant states: By “sensus communis,” however, is to be understood the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole, and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions could [be] easily held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment.20

In this way, the sensus communis provides a common ground for an aesthetic experience, and the communicability of the sensation embodies a form of linguistic practice in place of the predicative acts of a determinate judgment. Practice and usage thereby become hallmarks of judging as such. Implicitly, then, agreement only becomes possible by mediating different perspectives. The development of community in this aesthetic context does not rest on a collection of individuals, but rather upon a potential for agreement mediated by an exchange or concurrence among them.21 Perhaps the ultimate example of this lies in reason’s ability to adjudicate disputes and create for itself a “tribunal” in which to do so. The self-reflexivity of reason requires the kind of grounding that is implemented through the subject’s reflection on the harmonization of its faculties in an aesthetic experience. Correlatively, the possibility of achieving reciprocal agreement through language, as a form of linguistic practice, gives warrant (on a material as well as a formal level) to any attempt to adjudicate different philosophical disputes. Ultimately, the power invested in reason to engage in such criticism extends to the vocation of the philosopher him/herself.

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In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method” at the close of the first Critique, Kant seems to suggest as much when he states: Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibitions, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion … Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is simply the agreement [emphasis mine] of free citizens, of which each must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.22

The discovery of language as a practice, prior to predication, opens up other possibilities of linguistic usage. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant further clarifies this aspect of language in suggesting that the “art of reciprocal communication” is a necessary precondition for the development of a lawful society.23 We saw in the case of transcendental ideas that language can be deployed to mark the boundaries of pure reason, of conveying the importance of what is unknown as still meaningful in some way (apart from any objective determination by concepts). In the conclusion to the Prolegomena, he specifically appeals to analogy as a linguistic vehicle to render meaningful such theological statements as “God loves humanity” where no object can be given to fill out the content of the grammatical subject (and hence what can be intimated by grammar of the verb, “to love,” in this instance).24 According to Kant, avoiding the presumption that there could be a corresponding object (for such a claim), nevertheless, proves to be a “positive cognition” by enlisting boundaries to expand the circumference of what can be meaningful, albeit not knowable.25 The formation of such a horizon reserves a space for the development of new meanings through the use of analogy (schema analogon),26 thereby paving the way for the employment of metaphors, symbols, and other figurative forms of expression, apart from a linear correspondence between words and things. As Kant states in this key section from the Prolegomena: But we stop at this boundary if we limit our judgment merely to the relation which the world may have to a being whose very concept lies beyond all the cognition which can attain within the world. For we then do not [emphasis my own] attribute to the Supreme Being any of the properties in themselves by which we represent objects of experience, and thereby avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism; but we attribute them to this relation to the world and allow ourselves a symbolic anthropomorphism, which in fact concern language only and not the object itself.27

In the aesthetic sphere, how language can engender new meanings once again becomes paramount, even though Kant may not explicitly “theorize” about this possibility. Aesthetic ideas arise to extend the scope of what can be signified by reference to something phenomenal, e.g., a bird, in order to depict in images an ethereal concern that cannot be presented phenomenally, e.g., the flight of the spirit.

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As the faculty for producing images, imagination provides an important conduit for extending the conventional meaning of words, at least insofar as they are confined (ostensively) to a phenomenal referent. In this way, imagination provides an indirect form of communication. Thus, Kant distinguishes, among the “arts of speech,” poetry as an art of “carrying out a free play of the imagination as a business of the understanding.”28 Accordingly, even music can imply a language whose sensuality, e.g., in tone, is communicable through the harmony it evokes in the listener. As Kant states: This tone more [or] less designates an affect of the speaker and conversely also produces one in the hearer, which then in its turn arouses in the latter the idea that is expressed in the language by means of such a tone; and that just as modulation is as it were a language of sensations universally comprehensible to every human being, the art of tone puts that language into practice for itself alone, in all its force, namely as the language of affects, and so, in accordance with the law of association, universally communicates the aesthetic ideas that are naturally combined with it.29

Within the aesthetic sphere we discover another wrinkle to Kant’s Copernican revolution in which meaning is not restricted to whatever can be defined objectively, but instead comes to light through specific examples of art, including music and poetry. The self-critical activity epitomized in Kant’s philosophy invites the participation of each of us as instances of reason. That participation implicates the self-consciousness of the subject, not as some indeterminate substance standing on its own, but rather as revealed through communicative powers that are the corollary of reason and offer a ground for its critical activity.30 By helping to make explicit these powers, and showing how they can be inscribed in the linguistic practice of human beings, the third Critique provides a concrete footing for Kant’s enterprise overall.31 When seen from this perspective, as Surber points out, Kant is a forerunner to discourses of “self-critique,” which weave their way through nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and political thought, even if the Kantian grounding of that discourse remains suspect.32 As Surber has also shown, the architectonic completeness that Kant sought for his philosophical system via the third Critique may appear to withdraw into the shadows of German idealism and the explicit way in which language comes to the forefront in that tradition. Yet, the fault line that traverses Kant’s architectonic may not preclude the search for a hermeneutic completeness, which construes each of the “Critiques” as concentric circles each of which conjoins with the other by implicating the deeper problematic of language. Insofar as this other form of completeness resurfaces as a possibility, we discover that the transcendental turn in philosophy, which Kant first implemented, necessitates a corresponding “linguistic turn,” even if its explanation and systematic grounding within Critical philosophy remain only implicit.

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Conclusion In lectures comprising the Logic, Kant remarks that philosophy is built on the “ruins” of others.33 In the case of the interpretation and reinterpretation of Kant’s writings, we can conceive of the hermeneutic horizons as much more permeable. In other words, Kant’s influence on subsequent philosophy becomes more and more apparent even today. For example, he paved the way for key thinkers, from Hannah Arendt to Jean-Francois Lyotard, to extend the horizons of their own philosophies, not to mention others of even greater influence, including Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.34 The insights they forged, not to mention their way of reading Kant’s writings anew, create new vistas within which scholars today can return to study his works with profounder appreciation. Only given these further vistas does it become possible to revisit the embryonic issue of language in Kant’s Critical philosophy, particularly in the third Critique, and discover how a pathway is preserved that makes a detour around the German idealism of the nineteenthcentury into twentieth-century thinking. In this regard, the claim that a linguistic turn is implied in Kant’s transcendental turn is not a closed-end assertion, but an appreciation of an open-ended approach, by which we continue to be challenged by Kant’s Critical philosophy even today.

Notes Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 25. 2 Jere Paul Surber, “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence” 210–30, Hegel-Studien, vol. 10 (1975): 210–5. Later, during the Spring Quarter, 1978, Dr. Surber would direct my Honors Thesis, “The Problem of Man and Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics.” 3 See Frank Schalow and Richard Velkley, “Introduction: Situating the Problem of Language in Kant’s Thought” 3–26, in The Linguistic Problem of Kant’s Thought: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. F. Schalow and R. Velkley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), pp. 6–12. Also see Surber, Language and German Idealism, pp. 20–2. 4 Dennis J. Schmidt, Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 8. For further clarification, see Schalow and Velkley, “Introduction: Situating the Problem of Language in Kant’s Thought,” pp. 20–1. For a discussion of the link between aesthetic experience and figurative modes of expression, see Frank Schalow, “The Thread of Imagination in Heidegger’s Retrieval of Kant: The Play of a Double Hermeneutic” 511–28, in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology, ed. Cynthia D. Coe (Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2021), pp. 521–4. 5 Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 6 See Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Sprache: Die Metaphysik der Sprache und die Wesung des Wortes. Zu Herders Abhandlung “Über den Ursprung der Sprache,” GA 85 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999). 1

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For further discussion, see Frank Schalow, “Reinscribing the Logos in Transcendental Logic: Kant’s Highest Principle of Synthetic Judgments Revisited” 195–205, Existentia, vol. 19, no. 3–4 (2009): 200–3. 8 Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, GA 41 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), p. 190. The Question Concerning the Thing, trans. B. Crowe and J. Reid (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 129. 9 See Frank Schalow, “The Language of Time in Kant’s Transcendental Schematism” 53–69, in The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought, pp. 56–64. 10 For further discussion, see Frank Schalow, “Language and Temporality in Heidegger and Kant” 131–44, Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 11, no. 2 (July, 1995): 131–5. Also see Frank Schalow, “The Third Critique and a New Nomenclature of Difference” 71–5, Epoché, vol. 4, no. 1 (1996): 71–95. 11 See Frank Schalow, “Hume and Kant on Imagination: Thematic and Methodological Differences” 197–211, in Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Elizabeth Robinson and Chris W. Surprenant (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 205–9. 12 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 606 (A 759 / B 787). For a discussion of this passage, see Rudolf A. Makkreel, Orientation & Judgment in Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 62–3. 13 Kant, Prol., AA 4, pp. 350–65. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 91–104 (“On the Determination of the Bounds of Pure Reason”). 14 AA 4, p. 353; tr. 94. 15 AA 4, pp. 360–61; tr. 100–1. 16 See AA 20, pp. 193–251; tr. 3–51. See Paul Guyer’s, “Editor’s Introduction” xiii–lii, in Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. xxiii. 17 AA 5, pp. 174–5; tr. 62–3. 18 AA 5, pp. 179–80; tr. 67. 19 AA 5, p. 287; tr. 167. 20 AA 5, p. 293; tr. 173. 21 Kath Renark Jones, “Exposing Community: Towards a Dynamics of Commercium,” 130–44, in The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2000), p. 134. 22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 593 (A 738–9/B 766–7). 23 AA 5, 355; tr. 229. 24 AA 4, 357–360; tr. 97–100. See all Frank Schalow, “The Problem of Religious Discourse for Critical Philosophy” 1–6, Dialogue, vol. 25 (October, 1982): 4–5. As expressed in the footnote, my interest in this topic originates from my time of study at the University of Denver with one of Dr. Surber’s foremost and eminent colleagues, Dr. Francis F. Seeburger. 25 AA 4, p. 361; tr. 101. 26 See Bernard Freyberg, “Function of Imagination in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” 105–21, in Imagination in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Michael Thompson (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 107–11. Also see Freyberg, Imagination in the Critique of Practical Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 7–15. 27 AA 4, p. 357; tr. 97. 28 AA 5, p. 321; tr. 198. 29 AA 5, p. 329; tr. 205–06. 7

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30 For an excellent account of the confluence of the aesthetic dimension of experience, communication, and the horizon of meaning, see Richard Velkley, “The Inexhaustibility of Art and Conditions of Language: Kant and Heidegger” 288–309, in The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought, pp. 301–6. 31 See A. T. Nuyen, “On Interpreting Kant’s Architectonic in Terms of the Hermeneutical Model,” 154–66, Kant-Studien, vol. 84, no. 2 (1993): 155–61. Also see Richard Hiltscher and Stefan Klinger (eds.), Die Vollendung der Transzendentalphilosophie in Kants “Kritik der Urteilskraft” (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006). 32 Jere Surber, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 22–3, 39. 33 Kant, Logic, trans. Robert Hartmann and Wolfgang Schwarz (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Company, 1974), p. 29. 34 See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); F. Lyotard, “Reflection in Kant’s Aesthetics,” 375–411, trans. Charles T. Wolf, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 16, no. 2 (1993): 377–81; Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965).

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Chapter 6 S U R B E R A N D K R I P K E O N A P O ST E R IO R I N E C E S SI T Y William D. Anderson

The metatheory put forward in Jere Surber’s What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality1 is, to a very large measure, dependent on the strength with which he has supported the modal epistemology he sets out to defend fairly early on in the book. My aim here is restricted to an assessment of this modal epistemology and, in particular, to its representation as an appropriate response to a professed paradox. Because the modal epistemology supported is believed to establish the existence of a posteriori truths having logical necessity as their modality, I compare the merits of Surber’s modal epistemology to the more widely known one of Saul Kripke. Kripke’s defense has been regarded by many philosophers as a strong case for the existence of the class of statements Surber aims to support with quite different considerations. I turn first to the case Surber makes for the intended modal epistemology, followed by its assessment and comparison to Kripke’s. Kripke’s position is likewise given a critical evaluation. In the end, I try to show that the purported class of statements both Surber and Kripke aim to establish is nonexistent and for quite interesting reasons. These reasons, I believe, strengthen our appreciation for the traditional view as to how modal and epistemic concepts are related to one another. Surber believes that the following three sentences, taken to express “judgments,” represent instances of a posteriori truths that, nevertheless, enjoy the modality of logical necessity: (1) the universe contains embodied human beings; (2) the universe contains signifying systems; (3) the universe contains ideals. However, Surber also takes their necessity to have an associated paradox. The identified paradox results, he says, once we entertain the negations of these three judgments. With specific reference to the first two judgments only, their respective negations imply the nonexistence of what is a necessary condition for their truth as judgments to exist, namely, the presence of one judging. The impossibility of what would have to be the case for their negations to be true, a nonexistent, but existing entity present whose judgments they are, shows the paradoxical feature of these particular judgments. And Surber takes this paradoxical consequence to be that the affirmative judgments expressed by (1) and (2) above are contingent truths,

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but contingent truths whose negations are, nevertheless, “self-negating.”2 Since an apparent inconsistency is taken to have a corresponding reality to it, what is then said to follow and so what must be embraced, as counterintuitive as it is, is a dual modality assignment to at least the first two judgments above and their associated negations. Surber is perfectly aware, however, that to say one and the same statement has as its negation the very opposite modality from the one it has affirmatively is to imply a modal asymmetry that prevents both the modality of logical necessity and that of contingency from representing the otherwise modal exclusivity these two modal properties have in their common usage. Yet he does not offer an alternative semantics for these two modal concepts, and the failure to do so deprives the words “There are a posteriori logical necessities” from stating what they do when “necessity” and “contingency” have their ordinary applications to statements whose corresponding truth conditions are incompatible. Responsible for the notion that the negation of a contingent truth can be a logical impossibility is Surber’s apparent conviction that the associated paradoxes preclude an alternative analysis from the one he has provided. So, next I offer reasons why the argument intended to support the “paradoxes,” and hence opposite modal assignments to a statement and its negation, is unsound. This quite naturally leads to a subsequent appraisal of Kripke’s often-celebrated attempt to establish the existence a posteriori necessity, an attempt that may be the replacement Surber needs to supplement the metatheoretical project envisioned in his What Is Philosophy? But now to the problem confronting Surber’s belief that he has found a paradox, one warrants the intended dual modality thesis. The source of this alleged paradox is the identification of (A), The judgment that the  universe does not contain embodied human beings is what presupposes that  the universe does contain an embodied human being, with (B), the judgment that the universe does not contain embodied human beings contradicts the fact that it does contain a human being, the one whose judgment it is. Only when the concept of presupposition is identified with the concept of contradiction does “Not P presupposes P” get replaced with “Not P and P.” The former, however, implies only that P is a necessary condition for Not P, and that itself is equivalent to simply P. What contributes to the appearance of a contradiction being the result of denying, “The universe contains embodied human beings,” or of denying, “The universe contains signifying systems,” is Surber’s use of “judgment” instead of “proposition.” The former noun, unlike the latter noun, implicates the presence of a mental act and thus an embodied mind performing that act. The use of “proposition,” to designate the information represented, indifferently to its vehicle of representation, does not. Somewhat differently captured, conceptual detachment of “information” from any one particular source of its representation occurs in the language of computational neuroscience and physics as well.3 And, I am suggesting that if we put the stress on the information involved and not on its occurrence as a mental happening, the “paradox” creating the dual modality thesis is removed. The two contingently true propositions, “The universe contains embodied human beings” and “The universe contains signifying systems,” are free of negations that stand for either contradictions or presuppositions that

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are relevant to their modal identity. Borrowing a distinction W. V. Quine has marked, “A veridical paradox packs a surprise, but the surprise quickly dissipates itself as we ponder the proof. A falsidical paradox packs a surprise, but it is seen as a false alarm when we solve the underlying fallacy.”4 What I am claiming, then, is that Surber’s “paradox” is “falsidical,” not “veridical,” and the “surprise” it packs as the need either to accept a contradiction or, alternatively, buy into an unexpected and unwelcomed modal inclusivity is, to borrow words from Quine, “seen as a false alarm when we solve the underlying fallacy.”5 Before turning attention to Saul Kripke’s case for a posteriori necessity, the following introductory remarks are offered to highlight the desired perspective from which to view and compare the two quite differently supported modal epistemologies having, nevertheless, a common title given by their corresponding, separate authors, Surber and Kripke. It seems fairly clear that both Surber and Kripke wish to offer a broader perspective of the aims of philosophical research from a point of view more or less under the domination of a paradigm incompatible with a modal epistemology that supports the idea of an a posteriori necessity. From the viewpoint of more than just a few outsiders favoring this broader perspective, the conception and practice of strictly analytic philosophy have fallen prey to an entrenchment in thought unbecoming to philosophy’s reputation as a discipline defined by its honored love of wisdom. So, independent of the degree to which either Surber or Kripke makes a strong enough case to justify their desired points of view, the broader metaphilosophical aspiration they appear to share is certainly worthy of comment. Nevertheless, the success of a sustainable metatheory that answers to the expectations of a posteriori necessity confronts obstacles not identified elsewhere in the relevant literature, to my knowledge, and these are the focus of attention in the critique to be presented. The metatheoretic aspirations of Surber’s What Is Philosophy? are shortcircuited if the problems I claim to have pointed to are as defeating as I make them out to be. Would giving up the implied, and problematic, “inclusivity” assigned to the reference domains of “necessity” and “contingency” be enough to put fuel back into the engine driving Surber’s modal epistemology? This would have to be accompanied by a replacement of “judgment” with a notion exempt from the implication that the presence of a mental act must accompany the existence of information. That said, let’s now turn our attention to Kripke, whose view is not subject to the same shortcomings but has its own difficulties. Kripke says that the rejection of his view that propositions epistemically countenanced as a posteriori can have the modality of necessity stems from a failure to distinguish, sufficiently well enough at least, the concept of “a priori knowledge” from the different modal concept of “necessity.”6 The mistake, as he sees it, is a confusion of epistemological issues with what are quite distinctly metaphysical issues of modality. And the metaphysical position his modal epistemology aims to complement is given the title “Essentialism.”7 This is the view that certain properties or attributes belonging to their respective subjects are what is essential to their very identity as the entities they are. “Odd” and “Even” are essential to the identity of the number three and the number two, respectively. It is logically impossible for

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even numbers to be odd numbers or for odd numbers to be even. Kripke thinks that certain nouns in our language have the semantical role of a “rigid designator.”8 When you use a rigid designator to refer to some entity, the attribute you ascribe to it, if it applies, will be either what belongs to that entity as a property of its very identity as the kind of thing it is, or instead, what belongs to it such that it would remain the kind of thing it is without having that particular property. So, “living in a white brick house” is an accidental attribute of a living human being, but “having lungs that need oxygen” is essential to be a living human being. If the attribute ascribed to an entity picked out by a rigid designator is an essential property of that entity, the assertion that this entity has that property will be what is a necessary truth. If the attribute ascribed is not one that is essential to the very identity of the entity picked out by a rigid designator, the assertion that the entity has that attribute is, if true, only contingently so. With this is as background, we can now attend to what Kripke’s modal epistemology is. As remarked, it does not share with Surber’s view the same problems we have already encountered. It has its own, however, and to reach these we need first to understand what the view is represented to be, in its detail as a defense of a posteriori necessity. While standing before a lectern and speaking to an audience, Kripke once famously uttered the words, “This lectern is not made of ice.”9 The talk he was to give, referring to the proposition he intended to express with these words, was to become quite famous. Kripke was offering the statement he made in uttering those words as an example of a proposition whose actual truth value is known only by appeal to sense-experience, but a proposition which, nevertheless, enjoys the status of a logical necessity, equally characterized by him as a “metaphysical necessity.”10 The basic idea here is that, since the particular lectern is the one it is by virtue of its being made of wood and not ice, it would not be the same lectern it is were it an ice lectern and not a wood lectern. The expression “This lectern,” accordingly, is a “rigid designator” and picks out an object the composition of which it has as a property essential to its being the very lectern it is. And because this property is an essential one, the proposition declaring that the given lectern has that property is a necessarily true proposition. Yet, the idea is, it is a true proposition that could not have been known to be so independently of observation, by sight and/or touch, for example. The conclusion Kripke draws, then, is that the proposition he expressed by the words, “This lectern is not made of ice,” is necessarily true but known to possess the truth value it actually has only a posteriori. A significant consequence this argument is intended to have is: The traditional modal epistemology, dictating that only knowledge of a contingent proposition’s truth value is what provides a posteriori knowledge, suffers “the illusion of contingency.”11 This is a failure to grasp the difference between (a) knowledge of the modality of a proposition’s truth value and (b) knowledge of its actual truth value only. In an effort to ensure a fair hearing for Kripke’s modal epistemology, it is worth the risk of restating to some measure, but, in a slightly different way, points just addressed but important to stress, nevertheless. The apparent paradox, frequently associated with the idea of an a posteriori necessity, is insensitive to, and so overlooks, the fallacy of identifying the given

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exclusive modal distinction with an alleged corresponding, epistemic difference taken to have a “one-to-one mapping” relation to the modal distinction. Result: The failure to appreciate the epistemic distinction stated above between (a) and (b). In its instantiation as a particular instance, it is the failure to witness the difference between (1) knowing that the (intended) proposition, “This lectern is not made of ice,” is a true proposition and (2) knowing that it is a necessarily true proposition. Only (2) makes an explicit claim about the modality of the true proposition made by (1). Moving away now from this attempted fair representation of Kripke’s view and turning instead to its assessment: What I am going to argue presently is that at least an apparent paradox is associated with the joint acceptance of two things that follow from what we have so far learned to be Kripke’s modal epistemology. One thing we have been reminded of is that Kripke’s “illusion of contingency” aims to correct what otherwise is indeed a problem encountered with Surber’s position. That problem is an inclusivity in the modal identity of a proposition. Recall again, but briefly, Kripke’s point that to say the proposition expressed by the (contextually uttered) sentence, “This lectern is not made of ice,” states a contingency if it is an a posteriori truth, is an invalid inference. What he rejects is the idea that the exclusivity of modal attribution must be accompanied by a corresponding exclusivity of epistemic identity. So, Kripke’s rendition of the modal epistemology identified as the view that there are necessities whose actual truth values are known a posteriori is not intended to imply a corresponding modal inclusivity. It is not to have, as a consequence, that one and the same proposition could be necessary if known a priori but contingent if known a posteriori. If it does have a paradoxical implication it is not that one. But I do think a very strong case can be made for saying there is a paradox here. Borrowing again from Quine, the paradox in question may be only apparent and, thus, “falsidical.” Yet, it may, instead, be a “veridical” paradox. If the former then the argument to be provided and subsequently evaluated will be unsound if not simply invalid. Consider, then, this line of thought: only if the actual truth value of a necessity is accidental to that proposition’s identity is it possible for a necessary proposition’s actual truth value to be what is known a posteriori. For, what a posteriori knowledge provides is knowledge as to whether the truth value a given proposition has as a possibility is or is not what is actual. A posteriori knowledge of a necessity’s actual truth value is, thus, logically independent of the knowledge of its modal truth value as a necessary truth only if the possibility such a proposition represents as actual, if true, is a possibility distinguishable from the actuality of that possibility. But that distinction is absent for a necessity, with the implication that one has misidentified the exclusively different relation actuality has to possibility for the respective two modal types, if a necessity is taken to be a proposition whose actual truth value is what is known, or even knowable, a posteriori. Something overlooked or incorrectly stated occurs in either the abbreviated line of thought directly above or in its much lengthier presentation throughout the entire essay, if Kripke’s view is correct instead. Putting in different words only the very same point: Only if the lengthier or abbreviated version of this essay’s central

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supporting argument is unsound reasoning has Kripke’s “illusion of contingency” freed the concept of an a posteriori necessity from the charge that it is a “veridical” paradox and not, at best, only a “falsidical” paradox.

Concluding Observations A distinction often found in mathematics can be applied here in an effort to stress a central point of the essay. Exceptions to the possession of a property defining the regular members of a given class (or series) are titled the “limiting cases.”12 This affords an economy in description that brings the exceptions within range of a definition that genuinely characterizes only the regular members themselves. This linguistic strategy permits a reduction in terminology and governing rules that an otherwise explicit acknowledgment of exceptions prevents. What I have attempted to do in the essay is to mark the exceptional difference in the relation of possibility to actuality for the respective modal classes of necessary statements, on the one hand, and contingent statements, on the other. Attention to the exclusively different “possibility” represented as actual by a necessity from the possibility represented as actual by a contingency gets us to see a corresponding difference. Because the possibility represented as actual by a necessity is the only possibility of what is actual, the relation a necessity has to its actual truth value prevents what is required for a statement to be a posteriori. The proposition must provide for a distinction between what is possible and what is actual that a necessity does not do. The actuality of the possibility that obtains for a logical necessity is identical to the possibility represented. If one has apprehended the appropriate possibility represented as actual by a necessity, if they have identified the correct proposition the sentence for it expresses, they know a priori that this is a true proposition. Necessities are the “limiting cases” of contingently true propositions. They represent exceptions to the accidental relation actuality has to possibility when a proposition is said to require one to determine if the represented possibility is actual or merely a possibility. The two qualitatively different relations of possibility to actuality that separate propositional necessity and contingency are implied, I have earlier argued, by Kripke’s so-called “illusion of contingency.” Two final points, the first novel and the second a brief return to points from the opening paragraph directly above. Here is the first: Kripke says that the following is an a priori conditional truth whose antecedent is, nevertheless, itself what is known only a posteriori. Here’s the conditional: “If the lectern before me is not made of ice, then it is a necessary truth that it is not made of ice.”13 Where “p” stands for the given true proposition of the conditional’s antecedent and “Np” stands for the conditional’s consequent, Kripke is saying this: It’s reasoning alone, unaided by observation, that we know, if “p” is true but possibly false, then the conditional statement that, if “p” then “Np,” will itself be false. So, if we do know a priori that “p” implies “Np,” what we know is that the antecedent of this conditional statement, namely, “p” is what has the actual truth value it has, namely, true, as its only possibility. Kripke does say we know a priori that “p” implies “Np,” so, it follows that we know a priori as well that “p” cannot be possibly false if it is true,

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because that would make the conditional itself false. So, a priori knowledge of the conditional statement, knowledge Kripke says we have, also tells us that if “p” is true, we can know this a priori, since it cannot be what is just actually true but possibly false. Kripke, then, must be wrong in saying, as he does, that “p” must be a statement we can know to be true, if we can know it to be true, only a posteriori. And here is why, relating it to what has been said previously in this essay. If the statement replacing “p” is a necessity, then correct identification of the relation it implies exits between what it represents as a possibility and the actuality of that possibility, an identity, prevents knowing what it states, but not knowing the truth value of what it states, upon sufficient reflection at least. The case I have intended to make throughout depends on the truth value of a necessity being what it possesses intrinsically, as an identifying attribute of the proposition to which it belongs. Moreover, since what is indistinguishable from the knowledge acquired in correctly identifying the possibility represented as actual by a necessity is knowledge of the actuality of that very possibility itself, knowledge of a necessity’s actual truth value is knowledge obtained a priori, independently of what is external to the knowledge such a proposition provides in grasping its represented identity of possibility and actuality. Necessities are the “limiting cases” of the relation possibility has to actuality for contingencies. They provide the otherwise called “exceptions” to that relation. And the explanation why necessities lack truth values whose determinations require reference to experience is now fairly straightforward. Necessities are the limiting instances of contingencies, the exceptions, because they cancel the otherwise distinction between possibility and actuality needed for a proposition to reference in being an a posteriori proposition.

Notes Jere Surber, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality (Melbourne: re. press, 2014). 2 Surber, What Is Philosophy?, 65–75. 3 Cf. Hans Christian von Baeyer, Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chaps. 5–6. 4 W. V. Quine, “The Ways of Paradox” 3–20, in The Ways of Paradox and other essays, ed. W. V. Quine (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 11. 5 Quine, The Ways of Paradox, 11. 6 Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity” 388–407, in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, ed. James Baillie, 2nd ed. (New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, 2003), p. 400. 7 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 394. 8 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 398. 9 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 399. 10 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 398. 11 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 406. 12 Cf. Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 82–8. 13 Kripke, Identity and Necessity, 400. 1

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Chapter 7 F R E E D OM AT R I SK : G U Y D E B O R D, D O NA L D T RUM P, A N D T H E S TAT E O F T H E S P E C TAC L E Gary Percesepe

1 Paris: 1967. One year before “les evenements de soixante huit,” a French activist and theoretician published a book comprised of 221 provocations of which this is the first: “In Societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”1

2 Guy Debord’s La Societe’ du Spectacle2 dropped from an obscure press in France, written by a reclusive author who shunned interviews. A slim book in a plain white cover, it was a blistering social critique—221 “theses” indicting the “spectacular society” that had eradicated human lived experience, replacing it with images and pixels, reducing us to passive spectators in our own lives. Though sometimes lumped with theorists as different as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, neither of whom was Marxists, Debord was a founding member of the avant-garde Situationist International (SI), whose work ranged far beyond the commonplace criticism of “mass media” and “the dangers of the internet age.” The spectacle is much more than what occupies our screens. It has occupied us.

3 Debord argues that the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is rather a social relation between people that is mediated by images. Nor is the spectacle mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. “The spectacle is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.”3 Those who think of Debord as a sort of “lesser known MacLuhan” or a less cool precursor

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to Baudrillard (“Baudrillard without the hyperreality and simulacra”) may be surprised to learn that Debord regarded MacLuhan as the spectacle’s first apologist. Twenty years after the publication of La Societe’ du Spectacle, Debord published his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. He was characteristically blunt: MacLuhan himself, the spectacle’s first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he finally discovered in 1976 that “the pressure of the mass media leads to irrationality,” and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage. The sage of Toronto had formerly spent decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom, and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity …. However, MacLuhan’s ungrateful modern disciples are now trying to make people forget him, hoping to establish their own careers in media celebration of all these new freedoms to “choose” at random from ephemera. And no doubt they will retract their claims faster than the man who inspired them.4

Debord is critical of MacLuhan for accompanying those whose only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. “They are the privilege of front row spectators who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed!”5 Rather than enter into a sustained critique of what Debord called the “integrated power of the spectacle,” people today prefer to speak of “the media.” The term “media” is meant to describe a mere instrument, a kind of benevolent public service that, to be sure, with the advent of social media has become a bit excessive; there are frequent calls for a return to higher standards, less greed, more self-restraint, and more “professionalism,” as well as (mostly empty) threats of greater congressional and parliamentary regulation. This completely misses the point. The integrated spectacle of which Debord speaks has nothing to do with the perfecting of media instruments and everything to do with the spectacle concentrating power by obscuring its origins, so that it cannot be identified by any known leader or clear ideology.

4 As for Baudrillard, who was an early enthusiast of SI, the situation is more complicated. For Baudrillard, reality is always enmeshed with elements which are unreal—simulacra—leading him to view philosophy as nothing more than a transvaluational game. Philosophy, as Jere Surber points out, has always had suicidal tendencies, reflected in its overt attempts to erase itself.6 For Baudrillard, the history of philosophy is one where history is a toy; its secret theory is that truth

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doesn’t exist. Thus, the world can only be understood in various and incomplete ways, or endured, perhaps—but never engaged with through a revolutionary praxis. Indeed, Baudrillard came to regard Debord’s political theory as the least interesting aspect of his work. From the early 1980s until his death in 2007, Baudrillard not only abandoned radical politics, he also argued extensively against all normative theory and against the possibility of emancipatory praxis. If philosophy was transvaluational, it seemed to be for Baudrillard’s private pleasure. While Debord and the SI sought to reclaim ordinary life, in Forget Foucault Baudrillard seems to turn to death as an ally.7 Debord, speaking from beyond the grave, might well respond: Forget Baudrillard. (Or, at least, most of him.) The critical project of analyzing the society of the spectacle—or, as Baudrillard might name it, the analysis of sign-value and consumption in a post-industrial age—needn’t lead to agnosticism about reality. The problem is this: once we give up claims about reality, truth, and liberation, we also surrender the possibility of a revolutionary praxis of everyday life. There is a disturbing acquiescence and passivity in Baudrillard’s later thinking, suspicion, and distrust leading to malaise. Displacing economic notions of cultural productions with notions of cultural expenditure, employing the concept of the simulacrum—the copy without an original—Baudrillard’s conclusions nevertheless are strangely similar to Francis Fukuyama, confirming the worst suspicions about the relevance of academics to people whose lives are marked by increasing social fragmentation, isolation, alienation, and abandonment.

5 Debord argued that the images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at, never altered. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autotomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is an inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.8 Beginning with its opening thesis, La Societe’ du Spectacle situates itself in that strain of Marxism most closely associated with Georg Lukacs, whose History and Class Consciousness extended Marxian analysis into the twentieth century: a critique of modern society as one based squarely on commodity production and its necessary corollary, the fetishism of commodities. In the same way that Hegel thought of himself as the first “non-original philosopher,”9 merely organizing and extending the work of his predecessors, Debord acknowledges his debt in his autobiographical Panegyric: “Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of what has come to pass.”10 Baudrillard is the wrong turn. In his book, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Jacques Derrida pointed us back to Marx with the reminder that it is important to know where the bodies are.

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It is not simply that “we need to return to Marx.” There are specters of Marx, ghosts of Marx everywhere, a disjointed or disadjusted now, a time “out of joint,” with the threat of coronavirus and Covid-19. Marxism must be re-thought, yes. But which Marx, whose Marx?

6 Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of time spent outside the modern production process.11 Debord makes clear that the concept of the spectacle refers to several things at once: subjugation of the world to the economy, the fetishization of goods, reification, alienation, ideology, and specifically, how images, representations, and a world reduced to entertainment prevent authentic life from coming into being. The spectacle is separation perfected, a negation of life, a negation that has taken on a visible form. In an epigraph to the first chapter of his book, Debord quotes Feurbach: But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.12

To understand Debord’s line of advance from Feurbach and Marx, substitute Feurbach’s “illusion” for Debord’s word “spectacle”; substitute Marx’s “commodity” with Debord’s “image.” Like body snatchers, images have hijacked what once was naïvely called reality. Products we make with our hands and relationships we made with our words have been removed, replaced by their simulacra. Images have become so ubiquitous in modern society that we no longer remember what it is we have lost. Spectacular images make us want to forget; indeed, forgetting is the point.

7 Where forgetting is required, remembering becomes heroic. Debord’s work, like the work of his French compatriot Patrick Modiano, recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature, delineates an ethics of hope and the possibility of freedom.

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Debord is unwilling to grant that forgetting absolves us of responsibility. In the great cultural shift from being to appearance, ongoing since Parmenides and Heraclitus and mythologized in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are all complicit. It may well be our inheritance, but we reinforce the spectacle when we give it our passive allegiance. It is not a question of rejecting uncritically the evidence of our senses, declaring 99 percent of our experience as false, unreal, or shadow. The cave must be given its due. If theories may be thought of as tools, Debord aims to supply us with what we will need for a lifetime of creative resistance: the spectacle must be repurposed for human ends. Borrowing from Lautréammont, Debord and the SI engaged in détournement—a repurposing that puts everything back in play. The spectacle is a system of domination so total that in order to critique it is necessary to use the spectacle’s own language against it in a general refusal. This requires not only skill but a keen sense of the ironic, and a fondness for play. Like Isadore Ducasse, whose Maldoror was published under the name Lautréamont, Debord is self-invented. His writing mixes genres, delights in parody and paradox, makes sudden transitions, and defies conventional notions of authorship and plagiarism. Like Lautréamont, Debord cannibalized his own writing as well as that of others. Lautréamont appropriated entire sections of Chenu’s Encyclopedia of Natural History, borrowing and reworking passages from sources as various as Homer, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire. Debord made no attempt to hide the “traces” of those whose work he reinscribed, refusing to deploy extensive quotations to “lend authority” to a particular argument. Like Lautréamont, he writes from the standpoint of himself. As he says in Panegyric: Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. Allusions, without quotation marks, to other texts known to be very famous, as in classical Chinese poetry, Shakespeare, or Lautréamont, should be reserved for times richer in minds capable of reorganizing the original phrase and the distance its new application has introduced.13

In The Revolution of Everyday Life, SI member Raoul Vaneigem recounts that already in 1955 Debord sought to deploy Lautréamont’s systematic use of detournement, which Asger Jorn later called “a game made possible by the fact that things can be devalued. All components of past culture must be reinvested or else disappear.”14 As for détournement, the closest English translation lies somewhere between “diversion and subversion.”15 Détournement is the act whereby the unifying force of play “retrieves beings” and melts frozen hierarchies of domination, which begin in childhood. For Debord, the two fundamental principles of detournement are the loss of importance of each originally important element (which may even lose its first sense completely), and the organization of a “new signifying whole” which confers a fresh meaning on each element.16 The goal of détournement is freedom, as commodified meanings reveal possibilities beyond the spectacle’s constraints. Debord cites Gypsies who rightly contended that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie will reign. In the pages of Internationale Situationniste one frequently finds the

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subversions of comic strips, as well as “true love stories” that were confused with bubbles of political propaganda, and parodies of soft porn pin-ups.17 Buildings were appropriated by graffiti artists; Asger Jorn created irreverent re-paintings of kitsch reproductions, and Debord’s films incorporated numerous texts, graphs, and images. There was a growing awareness of the tyranny of words and how they serve domination systems, yet paradoxically contain the seeds of their own reversal, embodying forces that can upset the most careful protocols of control. As Debord put it: “Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.”18

8 In a sense, there is nothing new here. For Marx, alienation from labor was a defining trait of modernity. We are no longer what we make. Yet Marx assumed that outside the alienation from our working lives, we could still be ourselves. Family life can be a safe haven. For Debord, there is no such haven because there is no outside. The spectacle’s relentless pounding of images pulverizes every haven into pixilated portals of alienation. The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle: Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production. The “growth” generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin.19

The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Like a fake god, the spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness, even while it destroys the possibilities of community and disintegrating critical awareness. Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. Yet, the closer their life comes to be their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life. The “integrated spectacle” which has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality has five defining features: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies, and the illusion of being “an eternal present,” leading to a world without memory, where images flow and merge, like reflections on the water. Living in the integrated spectacle is living inside a Modiano novel, take your pick: In the Café of Lost Youth (inspired in part by the photographs of Debord’s circle taken by Ed van der Elksen), The Black Notebook, Sundays in August, and Sleep of Memory. Even in Modiano’s slim memoir, Pedigree, we are adrift in a world of cosmic mystery which does not exist to be solved, only compounded. As Debord puts it, “With consummate skill

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the spectacle organises ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nevertheless been understood.”20 Perhaps no other event has been shrouded in more mystery than the events of May 1968, when France seemed on the precipice of radical transformation. The response of the spectacle was to obscure its origins and mystify its meaning, just as it did in post-Vichy France, also an obsession of Modiano. Writing in 1998 Debord declared: “Nothing in the last twenty years has been so thoroughly coated in obedient lies as the history of 1968. Some useful lessons have indeed been learnt from certain demystifying studies of those days; these, however, remain state secrets.”21 It was once thought that history was knowledge that should endure and aid in human understanding, “an everlasting possession,” according to Thucydides: In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interests of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance.22

By outlawing history, the spectacle succeeds in covering its own tracks. Its power is always already familiar, as if it were always there, as if it were indeed an “eternal present.” All empires and usurpers have shared this aim: like Rome, they would have us believe they are the eternal city to make us forget they have only just arrived. With the destruction of history, contemporary events retreat into “a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations, and untenable reasoning”23—a pretty fair description of a Trump “press conference.” Thus, the spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. We no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity, demolishing any sense of private life: Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grown-up, with a great show of politeness in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity” simply because political economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The “total denial of man” has thus taken charge of all human existence.24

The consequences are both disastrous and banal. There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them because they cannot free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various

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forces organized to relay it. Public spaces, like the agora of Ancient Greece, or an uncluttered non-commodified “commons” in Boston, no longer exist. The spectacle has erased history. When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist. The consequences of this for would-be democracies are apparent. “We believe we know that in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous.”25 No longer conscious of the colonizing presence of images, having accepted it as a law as certain as the presence of gravity, and complicit in our own “auto-colonization,” we live our lives as if nothing has changed.

9 Which brings us to Trump. And a reminder that Orwell was here first. When George Orwell published his dystopian novel called 1984, he had seen, at age forty-five, two world wars, the rise of fascism in Italy, the rise of Hitler in Germany, and the invention of airplanes, television, antibiotics, along with atomic power, guided missiles, and napalm. 1984 takes place in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), in the superstate of Oceania, a country embroiled in a seemingly never-ending war. Individualism and independent thought are persecuted as “thoughtcrimes” by the Thought Police. The people are controlled by the elite, privileged Inner Party, whose cultpersonality leader is referred to as Big Brother. The government even has its own invented language: Newspeak. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Winston Smith, the hero of the novel, embodies resistance, however futile. Somewhat romantically, he clings to the notion of truth: “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” 1984 asks us to consider whether it is possible to live in an age of untruth, where lies are official and truthtellers are ridiculed, taunted, silenced, fired, exiled, cancelled, and disappeared. The ability to falsify being unlimited, a person’s past can be entirely re-written and radically altered. A person’s past can be entirely rewritten, radically altered, recreated in the manner of the Moscow trials—and without even having bothered with anything as clumsy as a trial …. Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes.26

Donald Trump was known to be a New York Page Six tabloid celebrity who inherited over $100 million yet still managed to bankrupt his businesses while

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vastly overstating his wealth—a philandering “thousandaire” (as New York Times columnist Gail Collins mockingly called him) and owner of a small, boutique eponymous organization who stiffed creditors and perfected a kind of bullshit specific to the world of New York real estate. He fell upward and was promoted to Reality TV where he played the role of a businessman in a comical imitation of himself, enabled by the passivity of spectators who gaped and chortled at his absurdities. Of course, he became president, in the most literal sense of that term— one who presides over a spectacle made possible by spectators who are supposed to know nothing and deserve nothing. “Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator’s condition.”27 The name “Trump” enacts a spectacle of daily life wherein the spectators of ongoing reality TV show—the only show playing on the one channel available, which is impossible to turn off—participate in the making and shaping of unreality, click-baiting more and more unreality into their world, even as they are more and more separated from the truth. This process of auto-colonization reveals how wrong (if well-intentioned) Orwell was about “Big Brother.” Big Brother is not watching you; Big Brother is You, Watching.

10 The spectacle is tautological; its means are simultaneously its ends. In itself, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance. The spectacle operates with public consent to and passive acceptance of its monopoly of appearance. The auto-colonizing nature of this consent is seen in the fact that we click for more, we hunger for more of it, and there is always more to be seen of spectacle: it is a sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity, covering the entire surface of the world and basking endlessly in its own glory; the spectacle aims at nothing other than itself, L’etat, c’est moi. In one of the most famous theses of the book (#9) Debord writes: “In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false.”28 Never has the Debordian analysis of modern life resonated more deeply and darkly than in the frantic, fantastical, make-it-up-as-you-go-along nihilistic and numbing nature of daily life in Trumpworld. In Debord’s notion of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same list of trivialities”—we find that “truthism” is futile and as self-refuting as Trumpism. Debord told us what was coming. In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord was able to write, The spectacle proves its arguments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed … Spectacular power can similarly

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deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.

From “Day One,” at Trump’s inauguration, we saw that the “actual size” of the audience did not matter. The ensuing battle over images of the crowd, flashed onscreen by the comically inept Sean Spicer, demonstrated the banality of “truthism” or the “triumph of facts.” “Alternative facts” were provided, and crowd images, snapped from above or at ground level, competed with images of Obama’s crowd size and roiled “the resistance” into a collective delirium. Since then, each new day brings a scandal. At the same time, talk of scandal has become archaic. As Debord puts it, “Once there were scandals, but not any more.”29 New lies replace the old lies at a dizzying pace. Outrage is stoked on Rachel Maddow’s show, or Fox News, or any random thread of Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, until it is no longer possible to find our bearings, epistemically or ethically. The spectacle has swallowed it all. It goes on and on. In a particularly prescient passage, Debord told us that it goes on “to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.” So enormous that we can no longer remember last week’s lies or bring to mind the order and magnitude of outrages, or recall our recollections of what we first experienced when we saw for the first time the images of the “Access Hollywood” tape or speculated about the “pee tape.” Which came first? We cannot remember. Does it matter? Even Trump’s handle on Twitter ought to give us pause: @RealDonaldTrump. Really? Who can separate the real Donald Trump from the Onion parodies, the Borowitz Report parodies, the SNL parodies, Melissa McCarthy, Sean Spicer, Jeff Sessions, Sarah Cooper, Kate McKinnon, or Randy Rainbow? The president insists he has better ratings than Alec Baldwin and who can argue? Of course, by ratings, Trump means poll numbers for America’s ongoing reality show, each day a new reveal. Whether the show would be cancelled in the November 2020 election became the latest obsession, but in the weeks following the election it was made clear that Trumpism will not stop with Trump as it existed long before him, and in fact required him; the spectacle is a permanent feature of the modern landscape. What are Trump’s politics? No one knows. As Alain Badiou observes, Trump is a figure, a character, rather than a politics. Trump is a symbol of the disappearance of politics.30 Trump is like a professional wrestler, having turned America into episodic WrestleMania. His continuously aggrieved persona is devoid of any interiority, a booming, buzzing confusion of self-referential signs continuously signifying. As in antiquity, his face is a mask meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle; his supporters form the chorus. Like any professional wrestler, he needs someone to tangle with in a ring of his own rigging. As French semiotician Roland Barthes observed in Mythologies, the function of the wrestler is not to win so much as to entertain, to unfailingly perform the role assigned, going through all the motions which are expected of him.31 His rallies are a performance of his greatest hits, his

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best moves—the forced submission gestures: hammer hold; the attack moves: flying dropkick, the arm twist ropewalk chop, driving clothesline, coffin drop, frog splash, the diving double axe handle. His performance as president is precisely that, a performance signifying the exhaustion of ideas, which have become completely reduced to pure form, without remainder. As Barthes understood, the physique of the wrestler is the most basic sign of all, which like a seed contains the entire match: the Occupant is Hair I Am: above his corpulent body is a set of diacritical signs expressed as smirks, sneers, curled lip distain, conceited smiles, but always the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure, his every grievance a rage-tweeted spectacle in itself, meticulously covered by a trained media, whom he nonetheless taunts as he gestures toward their cages. Professional wrestling is a sum of spectacles, and the American Presidency has become the greatest show on earth. Truth has become a function entirely of power and subject to spectacle. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than there is in professional politics. Trump cultivates the image of The Bastard: essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, asocial, and lawless. He takes refuge behind the law when it is in his favor and breaks it when he finds that to be more useful. He feels free to reject the formal boundaries of the ring (did anyone really expect him to adhere to “debate rules” in the two matches v. Biden?) and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes. When necessary, he re-establishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect just a few moments earlier, then listens with glee to the howling media. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends his tag-teamed opponents into a mimetic rage: offended not so much in its morality but in its logic, it considers logical contradiction of arguments the basest of crimes. For his fans, Trump has an ideal understanding of things; the euphoria of Whiteness raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations. He need only continue to perform his baseness without apology. They will not quit The Occupant in the way that Hulk Hogan never lost a fan (unless and until he failed at last to be Hulk Hogan, ceasing to signify correctly). What liberals and “progressives” have not seemed to notice is the mechanism by which they themselves have become mere spectators, part of the spectacle itself, as with each tweet they groan, they gesture, they complain, they occupy new daily postures and poses of outrage, when the point is not to be a spectator but rather the producer, canceling the show. There is no power in being a spectator. Meanwhile, he goes on signing, the wrestler villain, with his mop of orange hair, his mouth in a pouty O, his face contorted into the very image of suffering—like a primitive Pietà, he exhibits for all to see his masked face, exaggeratedly contorted by intolerable affliction.32 Whether we love Trump or hate him is of little consequence if, as Debord believes, we are all complicit co-conspirators with the same addiction to the clickbait that brings him into focus, by consuming the images generated by his persona and what passes for his “politics.” Well-intentioned protesters who

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create and audition “memes” to serve as counter-images are easily co-opted by a new form of Vichy-ism that has left us collaborating with our fascination with spectacle. To our huffy outraged protestation that our solemn vocation of resistance is driven by concerned citizenship and moral vigilance, even a casual reading of Debord reveals that our growing consumption reflects instead a deepening addiction. Fact-checking and lie-counting may be necessary for the “historical record,” but as Adorno observed, nothing today escapes the marketplace, and these activities, however noble and necessary, are absorbed by the spectacle and have no impact on it. They only serve to feed the daily beast.

11 Their only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. They are the privilege of front row spectators who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed!33

Fascination with the spectacle has not led to an effective resistance to spectacle. In fact, recent research has found that while “resistance liberals” may think they are being effective in their resistance to Trump, they have not only misdiagnosed the problem, they are feeding the spectacle. As Eitan Hersh argues in Politics Is For Power, there is a world of difference between being a “hobbyist” online and being an effective agent of change. Hersh has coined the term “political hobbyism” to criticize the liberal propensity for obsessive cable news-watching and “online slackerism” that feels the need to offer a “hot take” on each political flareup by emoting and arguing and shaming and debating from behind screens. Hersh dismisses such compulsions as political activism. It’s not activism, it’s hobbyism. It does little more than to signal our identity to like-minded hobbyists, perhaps establishing a brand, but it leaves the world fundamentally unchanged, stuck in the status quo; in this sense, it is yet another form of conservativism. Hobbyists may think of themselves as being emotionally invested in politics, but they are not actually committed to solving problems. To put this into Debord’s frame of reference, liberals are not pursing power; they are treating politics like a spectator sport. Hobbyists learn the wrong information and practice the wrong skills. They are typically invested in the national news of the moment, caught in the drama of the latest idiotic tweet. So, a hobbyist might learn all of the details of the Mueller report, brag about having read every page, castigate fellow liberals and conservatives for not having read it in its entirety, and yet show no interest in getting actively involved in local issues where applying pressure could bring about change for real people who are catching hell in their communities. They know about Q-Anon but cannot name the members of their local school board.

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Debord showed little interest in presidential politics and regarded talk about such matters as little more than a diversion. To those who howl in objection, saying this logic leads to the re-election of Trump—or Berlusconi in Italy, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, or Boris Johnson in the UK—this takes us to the heart of the problem of the society of the spectacle: our contentment with these existing options, and the assumption that democracy is more or less complete and requires no further democracy (what Derrida poignantly called “the democracy which is yet to come”). We have come to accept that we are spectators in our society. With this passivity has come the belief that governments are unresponsive to our input, that “the system is what it is” and is impervious to our wishes, that radical change is beyond our reach, therefore we must not ask too much, too fast. It was Marx, after all, who defined political economy as “the final denial of humanity.” The coronavirus has precipitated a global crisis. This has become a cliché. Much attention is focused on the pandemic itself, fearsome enough, but the spectacle’s playbook has not changed: it’s the economy, stupid. Trump’s response to the crisis—after initially denying there was cause for concern and telling the world it was all a hoax and “fake news”—was to proclaim, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down.” In this, he is correct.

12 In 2020, even as the US government infused trillions of dollars through gargantuan measures of corporate welfare to “stimulate” the economy, the spectacle erased records of who received what, when. Oversight was waved off in a tweet. Children separated from parents at the border and housed in cages were no longer news. Spectacular power denies whatever it likes and changes the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of riposte. Because it controls the narrative, when the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it can act as if it doesn’t exist. As Covid-19 raged on, some wondered whether things would be different this time. Is this the “legitimation crisis” that would make visible the contradictions of capitalism and unite the interest of citizens in a way not seen since May 1968? In a word, no. Instead, all around us, we are told of the triumph of global capitalism. Markets soared after the election of Biden and the prospect of another huge stimulus package and a forthcoming vaccine. Socialism is a dirty word, and those politicians tarred with it discover, as Jaime Harrison did in his Senate race in South Carolina, that it cost them votes and contributed to their defeat. The same, of course, is true of communism, only more so. Marxism is everywhere regarded as a relic of the past. How far we have traveled since Sartre could say, without irony, that Marxism is “the untranscendable horizon of our culture.” In fact, as Alain Badiou says, Marxism is the epitome of a transcended ideology.34

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Badiou argues that Trump’s victory was symptomatic of a global crisis made up of four characteristics: • • • •

The triumph of a brutal form of global capitalism The decomposition of the established political elite The growing frustration and disorientation that many people feel today The absence of a compelling alternative vision.

Center-left political parties in Europe and the United States fail to offer this compelling alternative, and themselves form the elite of which Badiou speaks. In his new book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that American society has hardened into a hereditary aristocracy under the false flag of fairness. Living in a time when university degrees are closely tied to income and prestige, it’s easy to game the system. Setting aside the case of rich parents who bribe corrupt officials or donate huge sums to get their child into a good college, inequity creeps in without breaking any rules. At Princeton and Yale, for example, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent. Twothirds of students in all the Ivy League schools come from families in the top 20 percent. This is very largely because of the head start woven into upper-income life itself: engaging dinner conversation, better schools, private tutors, foreign travel. Simply put, people are “differently situated” and no meritocratic sorting process based on effort tied to “moral desert” can hope to level the playing field. The “rhetoric of rising” employed by Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and echoed throughout political systems fails to consider the darker side of meritocracy, and the implicit insult in the very idea of a meritocratic society: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault. Globalization brought rich rewards to the well credentialed—the winners of the meritocratic race. It did nothing for most workers. Productivity increased, but working people reaped a smaller and smaller share of what they produced. Although per capita income in the United States has increased 85 percent since 1979, white men without a four-year college degree make less now, in real terms, than they did then. Sandel argues that any serious response to working-class frustrations must combat this elitism and the “credentialist” prejudice that accompanies it. He argues that it is imperative to put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda, forcing American to confront the “class cluelessness” of center-left parties, and what happens when workers do not recognize themselves in how others see them—in Aristotelian terms, the virtue of feeling seen, needed, and honored. Sandel believes that thinking through the dignity of work would force Americans to confront moral and political questions easy to evade: What counts as a contribution to the common good? What do we owe one another as citizens? What about contributive justice, asks Sandel? Helpful as Badiou and Sandel may be, it is a mistake to separate capitalism from racism. As Ibram X. Kendi argues, anticapitalist policies cannot eliminate

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class racism without antiracism; antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies.35 To love capitalism is to end up loving racism; to love racism is to end up loving capitalism. This is because capitalism is inherently racist, and racism is inherently capitalist. The real problem is racialized capitalism. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.36

Like Sandel, Kendi is suspicious of “progressives” like Elizabeth Warren, who believe that capitalism can be reformed and kept from thieving. Warren, while calling herself “capitalist to the bone,” identifies herself as a different kind of capitalist, one who will enforce the rules of competition and ensure level playing fields. Kendi claims that this view of capitalism is ahistorical: When Senator Warren and others define capitalism in this way—as markets and market rules and competition and benefits from winning—they are disentangling capitalism from theft and racism and sexism and imperialism. If that’s their capitalism, I can see how they can remain capitalist to the bone. However, history does not affirm this kind of capitalism. Markets and market rules and competition and benefits from winning existed long before the rise of capitalism in the modern world. What capitalism introduced was global theft, racially uneven playing fields, unidirectional wealth that rushes upward in unprecedented amounts. Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when were markets level playing fields? When could working people compete equally with White people? When could African nations compete equally with European nations? When did the rules not generally benefit the wealthy and White nations? Humanity needs honest definitions of capitalism and racism in the actual living history of the conjoined twins.37

Kendi’s emphasis on racial capitalism underscores the insufficiently radical analysis of Sandel (meritocracy), Badiou (Trump), and, to be fair, Debord himself. Both racism and capitalism were born from the same unnatural cause, says Kendi, and they shall one day die from unnatural causes. Either that, or racialized capitalism will live into another epoch.

13 Lenin famously asked, “What is to be done?” In my classes, university students in the United States constantly lament, “What can I do?” These questions require honest answers. Debord has one: there is only one option open, and that is to form “transgressive public spheres” locally, and then invite participation globally. When confronting the integrated totalizing power of the spectacle, it helps to have a crisis. The coronavirus has given us one.

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As this chapter is being written, post-election 2020, the US government resembles a fire department getting alarms from multiple infernos: entering the worst recession since the 1930s, predictions of over 30 percent unemployment, small businesses collapsing, and struggling to care for a wave of coronavirus patients without adequate resources, while a defeated US president falsely alleges fraud, files frivolous lawsuits, and refuses to concede. Covid cases have spiked, states beg for help, competing against each other and with the federal government for ventilators; nurses wear garbage bags in the absence of sufficient personal protection equipment. The crisis has made visible deep fissures in American society that lie beneath the surface: economic disparities and social emergencies caused by an incoherent and broken employer-based healthcare system, lack of affordable housing or living wages, labor rights, or environmental protections. In Wisconsin, the coronavirus was weaponized for voter suppression, giving white folk their first taste of the meaning of Jim Crow. Where people live and whether they have access to safe homes, steady incomes, plenty of food and supplies, medical advice and care, and the ability to do social distancing contribute to the contagiousness and lethality of the disease. Systemic racism in the United States has resulted in the outbreak of Covid-19 “hot spots” in heavily black cities like Detroit and New Orleans, further evidence of the confluence of all these elements. Black and brown people are three times more likely to contract the virus and die. As Rev. Dr. William Barber observers, epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only the biology of the infectious agent, but patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and discrimination. One year before his assignation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the nation from the Riverside Church in New York City about the unholy trinity of racism, materialism, and militarism. On that day King proclaimed that “the whole structure of American life must be changed” and called for a movement of poor people “who have nothing to lose” coming “to take action together.” Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign is organizing around the nation to do just that. As many as 140 million people in America were already poor or about to be poor—one paycheck away from poverty before the coronavirus hit. As Barber says, Today, the structure of American life is indeed changing as we respond to the double pandemic of poverty and COVID-19. There are record numbers joining the ranks of the unemployed; hospitals and morgues are overflowing while the streets are empty; and many of the workers who have been deemed essential and mandated to work are those being paid the lowest wages, with the least worker protections.38

The Poor People’s Campaign seeks to organize healthcare workers, to act in their collective interest but the work is difficult. Karim Sariahmed works in a primary care health facility in New York serving mostly Black and brown people. In a recent essay in N + 1, Sariahmed writes of the difficulties in trying to organize health workers during the Covid-19 crisis:

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In my very particular context, it hasn’t always been easy to channel the spirit of the Poor People’s Campaign to organizing health workers—partly because good organizing takes more time and experience than I have had, and partly— crucially—because medicine usually ignores, reassures, and manages the language of the oppressed into silence. Gliding past people’s individual needs and their desperation is the mandate of a profit-driven health system. The direness of this situation will bring patients and health workers together almost by default, but the other thing that can unite working-class people is clarity about our shared conditions.39

A former pastor of The Riverside Church, Dr. James Forbes, tells a story of the sense of promise that was in the air in 1993, when a new president set about reforming the US healthcare system. Speaking to his friend, the theologian Walter Wink, Forbes described what happened next. The insurance companies, the big pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street, and other interests that were frequently at odds with each other all came together in opposition to healthcare reform. In Forbes’ telling, it was as if a giant integrated system collected itself and said, “Oh no, no you don’t, that’s not going to happen.” That integrated system is what theologian Walter Wink in his many books calls the “Domination System,” and what Debord calls the spectacle. Any call for a return of “the normal” in American politics or anywhere else in the world ignores the material effects of stabilizing the political system of spectacular society, and minimizes or ignores altogether the maldistribution of political power and wealth that the spectacle has consolidated. Normal is what got us here.

14 What does Debord think of our chances? Dr. King in that 1967 Riverside speech spoke of a “revolution in thinking” that must happen before transformation of our material conditions can occur. In similar fashion and around the same time, Debord argued that the establishment of spectacular domination is such a profound social transformation that will radically alter the art of government but has yet to be comprehended in theory. Old prejudices everywhere belied, precautions now useless, and even the residues of scruples from an earlier age, still clog up the thinking of quite a number of rulers, preventing them from recognizing something which practice demonstrates and proves every day. Not only are the subjected led to believe … that they are still living in a world which in fact has been eliminated, but the rulers themselves sometimes suffer from the absurd belief that in some respects they do too. They come to believe in a part of what they have suppressed, as if it remained a reality and still had to be included in their calculations.40

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Debord believed that the malformation of our social life was an impediment to transformation. Like Habermas, he criticized the principle of individuation or privatization of political action as actually depolitization. Everyone has a fundamental need to be seen; the logic of the spectacle is to keep us from being seen. The only thing that can help is an emancipatory praxis of collective action that will interrupt and intervene so that everyday people can really be seen and heard—a revolution of ordinary life. Debord was correct in making collective action the first requirement, but he failed in his attempts to do this with the SI. He admitted as much when he wrote, in 1960, “There is no ‘situationism’. I myself am only a situationist by the fact of my participation, in this moment and under certain conditions, in a community that has come together for practical reasons with a certain task in sight, which it will know how or not know how to accomplish.”41 There will be no new situationism. Debord knew as much. His real legacy is his writing. This he also knew. Of all the many names used to describe him and his work, “theoretician” was the only one he would acknowledge. Theories are like tools. Not every tool is right for the job at hand, and some tools are useless for certain tasks. Hence, all good theory must be practical. Yet it must also avoid being narrowly applied to particular programs or elections or specific legislation, remaining free from these constraints so as to provoke insurrection and revolution. Debord gave us a practical synthesis of creative, theatrical, and surprising collective action that has never been refuted, only underemployed. No one today can reasonably doubt the existence or the power of the spectacle. Debord delighted in citing the French establishment paper Le Monde’s endorsement of his work on September 19, 1987: “That modern society is a society of the spectacle now goes without saying.” Debord went on to comment, somewhat prophetically, We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the coopted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed on the spectacle’s stage. It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes. This changeover, which will conclude decisively the work of these spectacular times, will occur discretely, and conspiratorially, even though it concerns those within the inner circles of power. It will select those who will share this central exigency: that they clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are capable.42

There is an increasingly apocalyptic tone as the world faces twin threats of a novel pestilence and the inability to create an alternative to racial capitalism. We are reminded again of the limits of philosophical theory, and that every particular philosophy, including Debord’s, is always already a “meta-philosophy” that stands in relation to what Jere Surber calls “non-philosophy” both in terms of its own conditions and their excesses.43 Writing in 2014, in response to the

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question, “Does philosophy have a future,” Surber offers observations that can only be read as prophetic: Philosophy will have no future if natural, environmental, or deliberately produced catastrophes eventually destroy the material conditions for the existence of embodied beings or their flourishing beyond the threshold of mere physical survival. Its future will be rendered uncertain, if not impossible, if significative communication among embodied beings becomes suppressed or irremediably distorted by physical violence operating either as brute physical force, propagandistic conditioning, or the institutional control of communications media. And it may be seriously disrupted by the development of future bio-, psych- and cyber-technologies that manipulate, alter, or suppress our very capacities for experience and creative thought. An important aspect of the enterprise of philosophy in the future will involve its adopting an engaged attitude in identifying, critiquing, and countering these threats to its own existence, which are, at the same time, threats to the existence and flourishing of the human species itself. If such resistance does not originate in philosophy, it is difficult to see from whence it will emerge.44

The spectacle is itself a contagion that threatens us prior to pandemic. Individuals who passively accept their subjugation to an alien everyday reality are already participating in a form of madness that makes illness more than a metaphor; we are called to a vigilance that goes beyond handwashing and social distancing. In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Dr. Bernard Rieux reflects on all the ways we are connected as humans, and the inherent risk we pose to one another. The problem is not merely the microbe, it is human choice: [W]e can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to someone. Yes, I’ve been ashamed ever since I have realized that we all have plague …. each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.45

Camus came to believe that the actual historical episodes we call “plagues” or pestilences are merely concentrations of a universal condition, “dramatic instances” as Alain de Botton calls them, of a perpetual rule: that humans are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated at any time. In this sense, the microbe has no meaning in itself; rather, we create meaning from its chaos, even as it exposes the fissures, contradictions, mendacity, and cruelty of the spectacular system of domination from which it issues. Consequently, even when the plague “is over,” or when “the country is opened again,” we know that there is no final victory:

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And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what the jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day will come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.46

Surber and Camus take us to the outer limits of Debord’s question: what is it to be a subject? What is the process of subjectivation, and is there an end? Clearly, Michel Foucault believed in “the end of man.” In the notorious ending to Les Mots et les choses, Foucault writes: One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words—in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same—only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.47”

These are not the words of a misanthrope, rather the reflections of one who came to believe that what it means to be human can be understood both as an opening—“a line of flight”—and as a way of imprisoning life. Understanding the human person as a historical entity presupposes a relationship to “forms and forces” that shape human experience, which in this épistémé is the spectacle. Like Debord, Foucault believed that the human relation to “subjectification” and “autocolonization” was not fixed or eternal forces—they came into being at a particular

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historical time, and they can pass out of existence. Debord’s philosophy may be understood as a certain kind of “putting in play” of these forces in relation to capital, to labor, to language, to art, and ultimately to our conception of what is real, what is true, and what is beautiful. It is yet possible for the self-emancipation of the human species, even in an age of “inverted truth.” But it will take collective action, vigilance, and courage to create the democracy which is yet to come: The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy—to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions. Only there are individuals “directly linked to world history”—there where dialogue has armed itself to impose its own conditions.48

Notes Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berleley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), p. 2. Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes de production s’announce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles. Tout ce qui était directement vecu s’est éloigné dans une representation. 2 Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 1967). In this chapter I will be citing from a subsequent French edition, La Société de Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 3 Op. cit. p. 17. Il est bien plutôt une Weltanschauung devenue effective, matériellement traduite. C’est une vision du monde qui est objective. 4 Guy Debord, Comments on The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 33–4. 5 Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 61. 6 Jere Surber, What Is Philosophy: Embodiment, Signification, Ideality (Melbourne: Re.press, 2014), p. 335. 7 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 14. 8 Op. cit. p. 15. “Les images qui se sont détachéés de chaque aspect de la vie fusionnnent dans un cours commun, où l’unité de cette vie ne peut plus être rétablie. La réalité considéréé partiellement se déploie dans sa proper unite Générale en tant que pseudo-monde à part, objet de la seule contemplation. La specialization des images du monde se retrouve, accomplice, dans le monde de l’image autonomisé, où le mensonger s”est menti à lui-même. Le spectacle en general, comme inversion concrete de la vie, est le movement autonome du non-vivant.” 9 I first heard this characterization in a Hegel Seminar taught by Jere Surber at University of Denver, Fall 1977. 10 Guy Debord, Panegyric, Volume I, London: Verso, 2004, p. 66. 11 Op. cit. p. 17. “Le spectacle, compris dans sa totalité, est à la fois le résultat et la projet du mode de production existant. Il n’est pas un supplement au monde reel, sa decoration surajoutée. Il est le couer de l’irréalisme de la société réelle. Sous toutes ses 1

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forms particulières, information ou propaganda, publicité ou consummation directe de divertissements, le spectacle constitue le modèle present de la vie socialement dominante. Il est l’affirmation omniprésente du choix déjà fait dans la production, et sa consummation corollaire. Forme et contenu du spectacle sont identiquement la justification totale des conditions et des fins du système existante. Le spectacle est aussi la présence permanente de cette justification, en tant qu’occupation de la part principale du temps vécu hors de la production modern.” 12 Ludwig Feurbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity. 13 Debord, Panegyric, p. 8. 14 Debord, Panegyric, pp. 237–8. 15 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 86. 16 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 238. 17 Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 86–7. 18 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 207. Les idées s’améliorent. Le sens des mots y participle. Le plagiat est necessaire. Le progrès l’implique. Il serre de près la phrase d’un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une idée fausse, la remplace par l’idée juste. 19 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 32. “L’expansion économique est principalement l’expansion de cette production industrielle precise. Ce qui croît avec l’economie se mouvant pour elle-même ne peut être que l’alienation qui était justement dans son noyau original.” 20 Debord, Comments, p. 14. 21 Debord, Comments, p. 14. 22 Debord, Comments, p. 15. 23 Debord, Comments, p. 16. 24 Debord, Comments, p. 4. “Cet ouvrier, soudain lavé du mépris total qui est clairement signifié par toutes les modalitités d”organisation et surveillance de la production, se retrouve chaque jour en dehors de celle-ci apparemment traité comme une grande personne, avec une politesse empressée, sous le déguisement du consommateur. Alors l’humanisme de la merchandise prend en charge «les loisirs et l’humanité» du travailleur, tout simplement parce que l’économie politique peut et doit maintenant dominer ces spheres en tant qu’économie politique. Ainsi «le reniement achève de l’homme» a pris en charge la totalité de l’existence humanine.” 25 Debord, Comments, p. 20. 26 Debord, Comments, pp. 18–19. 27 Debord, Comments, p. 22. 28 Debord, Comments, p. 19. “Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment de faux.” 29 Debord, Comments, p. 22. 30 Alain Badiou, Trump (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), p. 25. 31 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape Ltd. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 16. 32 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 19. 33 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 61. 34 Badiou, Trump, p. 4. 35 Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), p. 159.

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36 Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, p. 161. 37 Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, p. 162. 38 Rev. Dr. William Barber, email from Poor People’s Campaign, April 12, 2020. 39 Karim Sariahmed, “There Is No Outside,” N + 1, April 15, 2020. 40 Sariahmed, “There Is No Outside,”, p. 87. 41 Guy Debord, Situationist International, Number 4, 1960, cited in Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord & the Practice of Radical Philosophy, p. 121. 42 Debord, Comments, p. 88. 43 Jere O’Neill Surber, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality, p. 335. 44 Surber, What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality, pp. 335–6. 45 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 252–3. 46 Camus, The Plague, p. 308. 47 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1989). 48 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 221. S’émanciper des bases matérielles de la verité inverse, voila en quoi consiste l’auto-émanipation de notre époche. Cette «mission historique d’instaurer la véritédans le monde», ni l’individu isolè ni foule atomisée soumise aux manipulations ne peuvent l’accomplir, mais encore et toujours la classe qui est capable d’être la dissolution de toutes les classes en ramenant tout le pouvoir à la forme dèsaliénante de la démocratie réalisée, le Conseil dans lequel la théorie practique se contrôle elle-même et voit son action. Là seulement où les individidus sont «directement liés à l’histoire universelle»; là seulement oú le dialogue s’est armeé pour faire vaincre ses propres conditions.

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Chapter 8 T H E C U LT U R A L D I M E N SIO N O F S P E C IA L N EWS P R O G R A M S : F R E E D OM A N D A E ST H E T IC S A S A MEANS OF COPING WITH EXTREME EVENTS Andreas Dörner and Ludgera Vogt

Culture Jere Surber presented a fundamental study on the relationship between culture and criticism in 1998. In this study, the difficult question of what is meant by the term “culture” and how culture can be meaningfully distinguished from other dimensions of human life is initially investigated. “History has left us no generally consensual definition of culture, nor could any completely satisfactory definition be given.”1 Even with the basic distinction of culture versus nature used in many encyclopaedia articles, one is soon frustrated by the search for handy formulas, as Jere Surber rightly observes: “So even a basic attempt to define culture by contrasting it with nature is unsettled by ambiguities, imprecisions, and uncertainties.”2 The difficult task of conceptual rapprochement in the scientific field became apparent as early as 1952, when Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckohn published their famous paper on Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. At the time they had already compiled no less than 162 distinct scientific definitions of “culture” and classified them according to various criteria. In his book, Jere Surber has chosen the path of illuminating different discourse contexts with regard to their understanding of culture. What is constitutive for it in any case is the connection between culture and criticism. As a reality made by humans, culture is always something that can—and must—be subjected to human criticism (from different positions and with different value standards). Culture and critique thus do not mark a coincidental or occasional pairing, but one that must always be considered when it comes to the cultural dimension of human existence. In this chapter, we aim to examine the cultural aspects of a field of media communication usually overlooked in research. The cultural dimension of special news programs, and in particular the aesthetic dimension, will be examined. Aesthetic form, thus our thesis, is of central importance in media communication concerning serious disturbances of social order, as they are presented in special news programs.

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Our chapter will take the following steps: First, the relationship between society and aesthetics will be considered from the perspective of modern sociology in order to develop some crucial dimensions and differentiations. Secondly, a distinction is established between the spheres of everyday aesthetics and art. Thirdly, against this background, the specific “aesthetic relationship to oneself and the world,”3 following Helmuth Plessner and Hans-Georg Soeffner, is to be determined, and here the sociological and philosophical discourses intertwine. This understanding of aesthetics opens up interesting perspectives regarding the audiovisual means of the presentation of special news programs.

Aesthetics: The Sociological Perspective Sociological research has been concerned with the role of aesthetics and art in the social world since its beginnings. Classic sociologists such as Marx, Weber, and Simmel have repeatedly examined the relationship between art and society. However, attempts to systematically determine the relationship between art, aesthetics, and society have only been developed much later. Apart from timediagnostic approaches describing a changing role of aesthetics in society (such as Reckwitz in his reconstruction of an aestheticisation in modern society under the imperative of creativity), four important fields can be identified in which a sociology of art and aesthetics was pursued: First, there is a context of works in the tradition of Marxist social criticism— such as the works of the Frankfurt School. The main focus here lies on ideological critique of how popular culture as a component of the “culture industry” contributes to stabilizing capitalist society.4 The critical perspective on popular culture in modern societies is still found today in many analyses of contemporary culture industries. Finally, (British) Cultural Studies mark an important branch of the originally Marxist-inspired, socio-critical analysis of aesthetics. They largely avoid the gesture of sweeping condemnation of popular culture and aesthetics, and also repeatedly work out potentials of wilfulness and resistance in the products of the culture industry.5 In addition to these ideology-critical approaches, research soon began exploring the socio-structural functions of art and everyday aesthetics: first and foremost in the works of Pierre Bourdieu, who examined distinctions and class tastes as well as their participation in maintaining social inequality.6 Later, for example, Gerhard Schulze analyzed the more permeable milieus of the “experience society”7 in Germany, and even later, social exclusion and inclusion were described in terms of the aesthetics of fashion and everyday objects.8 On the one hand, such research has (critically) made clear how aesthetic forms are involved in cementing and legitimizing social inequalities, regardless of whether they are arranged vertically or horizontally. On the other hand, such research, in particular research into culturally and aesthetically defined social milieus, has also been (affirmatively) transferred directly into instruments for marketing purposes of modern industry. The Heidelberg SINUS Institute in particular has been active in this respect for several decades.9

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Third, an empirical sociology of art business (including the literature and music business), or a sociology of the “art system” developed. Here, studies were conducted on actors and institutions: on artists, writers, and musicians with regard to their social situation, market position, self-perception, motivation, etc.; and above all on galleries, publishing houses and event agencies, on state cultural funding, markets and sponsors, and on the behavioral logic of actors involved. Such empirical individual research is then partially integrated and theoretically embedded in field or system theoretical perspectives. Examples include Bourdieu’s analysis of the literary field10 or, in the paradigm of systems theory, MüllerJentsch (2012), as well as Siegfried J. Schmidt’s studies on the literary system;11 the networking of actors and institutions in the art establishment is particularly discussed by Panzer et al.12 And fourth, Niklas Luhmann, for example, provides general functional definitions of the “art of society” describing the contribution of the specific mode of reality of art (literature, music) to social communication. Luhmann describes the function of the art system for society as opening up the possibility of specific views on reality and the “contingency” of the world,13 which in a certain sense corresponds to a description of art as a specific “province of meaning.”14 The sociology of knowledge has tended to hold back on more general statements regarding aesthetics and art. Apart from a few scattered remarks by Alfred Schütz,15 the analyses remain largely restricted to the pragmatic dimensions of communication and tend to ignore aspects of aesthetics up to the new interest in the moving image.16 Only occasionally is the aesthetic dimension addressed as a component of interactions and social rituals or the formation of symbols.17 However, Hans-Georg Soeffner has in one contribution attempted to fundamentally determine the mode and basic constellation of an aesthetic approach to the world by resorting to Helmuth Plessner.18 These considerations will be picked up hereafter. Our contribution proceeds as follows: First, a distinction is drawn between (everyday) aesthetics and art in order to sharpen our perspective for the following analyses of the aesthetic presentation of nonartistic media communication.19 Secondly, Hans-Georg Soeffner’s observations on the “practical meaning of aesthetics” are considered to determine the specific aesthetic access to the world.20 In the third step, this perspective is then transferred to the investigation of special broadcasts on German television: a format group belonging to the field of news reporting that is generally produced under such time pressure that intensive design effort is impossible. Using three brief examples, we will demonstrate that the aesthetics of audiovisual presentation play a central role in their functioning, despite the emphasis on pragmatism and sobriety of the formats. The aesthetics of the special broadcasts, as part of a media ritual of interference suppression, is suitable for providing a sense of security to people who are insecure in situations of severe social disruption (terrorist attacks, rampages, wars, catastrophes, and political crises). The short exemplary analyses are intended to explain why interpretation should not neglect the aesthetic dimension, especially in media analyses.

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Everyday Aesthetics versus Art If one wishes to think about the social functions of aesthetics, it makes sense first to introduce a fundamental distinction. Not all objects and communications that have an aesthetic dimension are to be classified as art. It is immediately clear from a first glance at everyday objects such as crockery and cutlery or furniture and clothing that these objects do have forms of aesthetic design, although most observers would not call them “art.” The first thing to do, then, is to distinguish such an everyday aesthetic from art. In order to bring some structure into this, we will refer to considerations of the Czech drawing theorist Jan Mukařovský in the following.21 According to Mukařovský, different functions can be determined for each language character and generally for each signifying object. The decisive juxtaposition here is that of “pragmatic” functions (in the case of the language sign: depiction, communication, and appellation) on the one hand, and an “aesthetic function” on the other. The latter is related to the form, to the composition of the (linguistic or nonlinguistic) object. It provides communication with a different mode, which in turn affects the meaning and semantics of the object and communication as a whole. Aesthetic design is thus not merely a decorative accessory, but an important component that affects the meaning conveyed. In the perspective of this approach, art is then constituted where the aesthetic function of one artifact is dominant over other, pragmatic functions.22 The latter are not completely negated, but “suspended” or enclosed in the sense that they play a different role within the framework of the artwork. The utterances in a poem, for example, take on a different status; they are no longer regarded as “pragmatic” statements, but as part of a linguistic artwork. The sanitary function of a urinal is not destroyed by its inclusion in an art exhibition by Marcel Duchamp either, but it acquires a new aesthetic function within the framework of the object now conceived of as a work of art. Of particular relevance to our context, however, is the aesthetic function beyond the realm of art. It is basically almost omnipresent: in the design of the toaster as well as in the architecture of the administration building, in political rhetoric as well as in fashion, in the beautifully presented food as well as in the body of a car. What is decisive here is that no object, no action, no linguistic sign “in itself ” is aesthetic or not aesthetic. Instead, an aesthetic function can be actualized by the perspective of the viewer.23 According to Mukařovský, the farmland furrows that have just been drawn are, in the eyes of the tractor driver, a sober, more or less effectively produced work result, while a pedestrian strolling along can enjoy their aesthetic properties greatly. Conversely, not every work of art is recognized and acknowledged as such by all viewers. The advantage of a functionalist model of aesthetics lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the immanent object-related consideration of aesthetic phenomena is replaced by a consideration of social modes of use. An aesthetic object, as the quintessence of Mukařovský’s considerations suggests, always emerges only in the act of reception, of appropriation by particular

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people. On the other hand, it becomes clear that aesthetic questions are always involved, even beyond art, in every social and communicative action, indeed in every object reference, albeit often merely in the background. Subsequently, it will be clarified how the aesthetic world reference can be understood and functionally determined in this nonartistic field. Hans-Georg Soeffner’s reflections on the “practical meaning” of aesthetics are the starting point.

Aesthetic Relationship to the World Hans-Georg Soeffner developed his understanding of the aesthetic relationship to the world based on Helmuth Plessner’s work. If one is to speak of perspectives in the sociology of knowledge in this context, then these perspectives have their basis in philosophical anthropology. The starting point is Plessner’s idea of an “eccentric positionality” of man as a generic being.24 Humans are both biological (corporeal) and cultural beings that must, so to speak, continuously reflect upon and find themselves culturally. What does this mean for Plessner’s view of aesthetic access to the world? The first important aspect is that corporeality and the formation of meaning are involved in the perception of an aesthetic object. However, this takes place in a special constellation. The counterpart of sensual perception here is also sense, but a sense that is given “atheoretically” by an immediate intuition.25 This possibility of immediate, but nevertheless meaningful experience is conceived “as the condition of the potential of the constitution of aesthetic objects in experience and perception (…) In this specific sensory experience—and perception activity, everything that is perceived is potentially transformable into aesthetic objects.”26 It is not a property of things, but a world reference that decisively determines the aesthetic, although this world reference can be evoked by various means of design. But what then, according to Plessner and Soeffner, is the specific function of this world reference, the functionality of everyday life, which nevertheless exists in the purposelessness of aesthetics? Here again the aspect of eccentric positionality of the human being as a generic being comes into play. The eccentrically positioned human being, a being with little instinct and its own autonomy, is in its lack of balance dependent on possibilities to overcome this elementary uncertainty in concrete ways of experience again and again. Aesthetics as part of culture offers such a possibility in order “to create by artistic means a base which time and again can only offer temporary as well as unstable support.”27 In summary: the aesthetisation attempts of humankind and its products—culture in its manifold historic manifestations—first and foremost refer to the task imposed on us, to face the fundamental insecurity and crisis tendency of our existence: to bring meaning to the diverging world of the senses and to create social order since we are continuously threatened by a mysterious inkling of the coincidence of our respective individual existence and the ‘world affairs’ as a whole.28

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The aesthetic form thus offers access to an experience that provides an atheoretically meaningful existential “ground” at the moment of sensory perception, however ephemeral and precarious this experience may be. It should be noted that this potential is not only inherent in art, but in every aesthetic form. It may even be said that the grounding function of aesthetics is important precisely where it is not a question of the “contingency” of the world, but of human everyday practice.29

The Aesthetics of Special News Programs: Grounding Insecure People If humans are already characterized by imbalance and uncertainty in his eccentric positionality as a generic being, this applies particularly to people in situations of disruptions and crises. Disruptions of social normality render the precariousness of cultural balance in human life particularly evident. Where does one experience the “fundamental insecurity and crisis tendency of our existence” more clearly than in such disruptions and crises?30 This is where the television specials come into play. The term “special program” refers to a very specific genre: not every program which interrupts a pre-planned television schedule, but those special formats which are broadcast by public broadcasters in Germany on (relatively) fixed slots after the main news program of the day. This is, on the one hand, the “ARD Brennpunkt” in Das Erste (there are also regional offshoots in RBB and BR) and, on the other hand, the format “ZDF spezial” in the ZDF main program. They are mainly broadcast in the event of sudden occurrences: terrorist attacks, rampages, and serious violent crimes; major accidents and (natural) disasters as well as extreme weather; war and civil war situations, but also political and economic crises. They are also seldom used for events such as elections or commemorative events with a longer production lead time. It is crucial that “Brennpunkt” and “spezial” offer not only pure reporting, but also classifications and processing of current events. This distinguishes them from other special formats accompanying events, such as breaking news programs or special editions of the usual news shows. For media culture, these special news programs are relevant in a double function: on the one hand, they bring the disruptions and crises into our living rooms; they alert us by labeling a disruption as relevant and making it clear to everyone that something important has happened. In doing so, they initially selectively increase our existential insecurity. Special news programs are part of the media, understood as a social alarm system that deals with disruptions and crises in wide-ranging formats of television, which still functions as the leading medium of modern society. Yet that is only half the truth because the special programs are at the same time forms of interference processing and crisis communication.31 They carry out ritual processes of de-interference, initially by means of pragmatic everyday communication: they visualize the interference and report on its course. They refer

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to contexts and causes, classify incidents, put those responsible to the test, and try, with the help of proven experts, to point out ways of solving problems. All this takes place in pragmatic communication. The special formats prove to be a mixture of reporting in the style of news programs, (short) features and explanatory pieces, which also provide background information on current events. The following is now decisive for our context: although most editions are produced under enormous time pressure and employ well-rehearsed routines, they also have a dimension of aesthetic design which is of great importance for the de-interference performance of the formats. How this can be understood and analyzed as “aesthetisation attempts” that counter “fundamental insecurity and crisis tendency of our existence” will now be demonstrated with a few examples.32, 33 These elements are all the more important because special programs often use dramatic images to initially attract the audience’s attention. Images resembling disaster movies are not uncommon. But the audience is not left alone with them. The horror of extreme images is accompanied by an aesthetic world reference with efforts of grounding and orientation. Stage Sets and Format Design of the Image The stage sets of the studios in which the special programs are presented are largely format-specifically consistent. ZDF, for example, uses one and the same studio backdrop. There is a slight variation on ARD, depending on the respective regional broadcasting station. Common to the “Brennpunkt” programs is the color scheme in blue, white, and orange as well as yellow tones (cf. Figure 1 below).

Figure 8.1  “Brennpunkt” from 24.06.2016, TC: 00:23, studio setting and format design using the example of the show “Die Briten wollen raus”, produced by NDR, presented by Andreas Cichowicz. © ARD.

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In their bright appearance, the colors convey the message that “light is shed on the matter” and that information is provided. First, the studio background works with these colors and uses horizontal, parallel lines that create a spatial impression. At the beginning of each broadcast, a map of the world is also outlined, symbolizing the wide reach of the news coverage and the correspondent network utilized. The semi-transparent blue caption used in the broadcast image, with an orange line angled downwards to the left and then running horizontally to the right, also picks up on the color scheme and formal language. This line also represents an orangecoloured extension of the Brennpunkt logo, which is displayed in semi-transparent white in the lower left corner throughout the program. The bend in the displayed logo offers a graphic visualization that makes the “Brennpunkt” visible as the focus of the program: At the height of the bend and the letters “NP” in the Brennpunkt logo (printed in bold) is the optical point where the light rays collected by an “invisible lens” (see the lines in the background) appear to strike. This interdependence of text and graphic design opens up the intention of the program: the explosive and “burning” topicality of the message must be brought in focus. As is usual for news programs, the studios are furnished with a table (a “news desk”). The materials are wood, metal, and plexiglass, the latter being illuminated from behind with light in the colors of the corporate design. The presenters and studio guests stand at the table, the cameras are placed in front of them and are displayed with the usual repertoire for news formats, consisting of half totals showing the studio and the presenter’s position in the room, close-ups during conversations as well as zooms on the presenter. Framed screens are placed in the studio background, which illustrate topics in words and pictures (graphics) or bring pictorial material to visualize what is being said. In the majority of cases, these are photographs or photomontages that are replayed during presentation passages or studio discussions. The “ZDF spezial” eliminates any station-related variations, so that the effect of a uniform corporate design is even more pronounced. In contrast to “Brennpunkt,” the studio is designed in clear shapes in red and light gray. Slightly buffered by light gray, the red signals an alarm, which is then “lifted” by the ritual processing of interference. The stage design includes a modern, semi-transparent presentation table and two large screens. The screens open the studio like “windows to the world” and thus symbolize the close relationship between the reporting and the addressed reality outside the studio. Altogether, the studio and image design generates a high recognition value. The aesthetics create order in disorder and can visually convey a feeling of security to the audience. The selection of presenters works in the same vein: often the same faces are used to create a feeling of familiarity. This also corresponds to the fact that paradoxically these special programs that interrupt the program are nevertheless—with a few exceptions—broadcast on a stable program slot, following the respective main news program (the “tagesschau” on Das Erste and “heute” on ZDF). This consistency reflects the basic promise of continuity of all serial formats on television and combines it with the visual familiarity of the ritual of interference processing. The viewer can thus feel that, regardless of the severity

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and intensity of the events, tried and tested mechanisms of interference processing are applied. On the aesthetic level, the eccentrically positioned person in front of the screen, additionally unsettled by disruptive events, is told that in the end everything will be fine again—just as in previous disruptive events and special broadcasts. The uniform design (in connection with the high constancy of the host group) provides stability and “ground.” The reassuring effect of special broadcast formats can therefore not only be interpreted as the result of explicit information, classifications, explanations, and solution perspectives, but first and foremost as the result of an aesthetic design that conveys confidence and trust. Interplay of Images and Music The auditory level in the special programs is shaped by aesthetic forms as well. An interesting example is the intro of “ZDF spezial,” which is consistently used in this form since 2013. Here, the interplay of image and sound generates crucial effects. The graphically designed intro is highly dynamic: two world maps meet orthogonally and shift into each other. The world maps are hinted at by the three-dimensional lettering of the word “SPEZIAL” (in white, black, red, and orange), which, partly clearly and partly indistinctly, stand out from the dark red background. A black vignette underlines the depth effect of the picture and emphasizes the centering of the viewer’s gaze. Different font sizes, wide and narrow letters, transparent and partly inaccurately defined, stand out strikingly due to the white/red contrast. In a searching gaze, the simulated camera movement in the animated image moves through the superimposed lettering (cf. Figure 2).

Figure 8.2  Intro of the “ZDF spezial”, here on the topic “Anschlag in Ansbach” from 25.07.2016, TC: 0:00:00, graphic of a world map with the format-specific lettering. © ZDF.

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The orchestral music for it is moving, dramatic, and determined by small intervals. It is electronically generated music with timpani and strings in the foreground, performed furioso. The music, as an important part of the labeling function of the program, dramatizes and alarms: it indicates that there is a relevant interference of social normality. The world maps indicated in the graphics visually support this significant dimension. The music ends and the “ZDF spezial” logo appears in the middle, then in a wiping movement from left to right the title of the respective program is shown: both the logo and the title are white against a red background. The logo, however, appears flat and two-dimensional, while the title font runs slightly backwards in perspective, thus appearing as a free-floating object in space. All in all, the image and sound are drawn with great dynamism, rendering the relevance of the event tangible. What is decisive, however, is that these forms of design are part of the serially recurring intro and are therefore ritual-iterate. An “alarm is sounded,” but since this happens within the framework of the constantly recurring intro of a special program, the alarm is partially restricted by referring to the de-interference potential of what will be offered in the following program. The alarm is “lifted” in the ritual, the uncertainty or irritation of the audience modulated by the calming and de-interfering framing of the ritual of the special broadcast. Chroma Keying Another conspicuous aesthetic feature of the programs are the backgrounds projected via the Green Box principle in Chroma Keying, which characterize the image during live transmission from other studios. If, for example, political actors or experts from other cities are called in, these people do not appear in front of a white or dark background, but are depicted in or in front of location displays. These images are usually moving images. On the one hand, such designs offer a localization of the interlocutors. The person is awarded with a special emphasis on reality because one sees: the person is now in Berlin, Frankfurt, or Munich. On the other hand, however, here too the aesthetic level is combined with a visual condensation of the place into a staged symbol. Typical images include the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag during live transmissions with political actors in Berlin (cf. Figure 3). The pictures aesthetically certify, by means of the venerable buildings, flags and quasi-sacred light installation, that the actors do not simply appear as profane people, but as representatives of the community equipped with the aura of the extra-ordinary—a community to which the spectators ultimately belong. This aesthetically evokes the feeling of community, of a unifying bond that evokes trust in the respective holders of office or mandate. Community spirit and trust, of course, are important components of the ritual of de-interference which is carried out via the broadcasts. A similar effect can even occur during live transmissions with experts. If, for example, the foreign policy expert Markus Kaim from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik is filmed during a conversation in front of the moving image of the

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Figure 8.3  “Brennpunkt” on the topic “Anschlag in Berlin” from 20.12.2016, TC: 0:12:29, in the picture German Federal Minister of Internal Affairs Thomas de Maizière in front of the projected studio background of the illuminated Reichstag building. © ARD.

Reichstag produced by the Green Box, the architectural symbol of legitimate political power in Germany attributes a special degree of seriousness to the expert. Here again it is interesting that the hosts, usually integrated in the picture by a split screen in the middle or standing in front of a monitor, participate in the community spirit and the attribution of seriousness. In this way, the moderators are transformed into a central element of the ritual of de-interference; they formulate questions about the state of events and their causes on behalf of the audience. In this way, trust in political actors, experts, and journalists is aesthetically amplified.

Culture and Criticism Finally, we must transfer the connection between culture and criticism that Jere Surber addressed to our subject matter. We have tried to show that it can be important for the processing of interferences in a society to cushion existential questions of the human and social order through the aesthetic world reference and to give orientation to people in a state of disruption. Here, a critical perspective could highlight the fact that such orientation goes hand in hand with reassurance and thus also a pacification of critical objections raised against responsible persons. Those who are oriented and reassured do not immediately ask critically who may be to blame because they have not taken measures to avoid disastrous events or because they have not been involved in the process of de-interference with commitment and prudence. Social institutions such as the police can also

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be indirectly exculpated by virtue of aesthetic design. The aesthetic message is that ultimately everything is not as bad as it seems at first glance. “We,” politics, society, and its institutions will rectify the disruption and get its consequences under control. A critical cultural studies analysis of the aesthetics of special news programs must always take such effects into account.

Conclusion Many other means of design could now be discussed: graphic elements, the use of music in film clips, text-picture montages, the application of slow motion and crossfades, etc.—due to limited space, however, the use of exemplary individual examples must suffice here. The abundance of design means is remarkable, because in comparison to other television formats there is little time for design in special programs. It was to be demonstrated here that and how the audiovisual design of formats that are basically rather sober and descriptive reveals aesthetic potentials on closer inspection, which are constitutive for the ritually de-interfering function of such broadcasts. The aesthetics of such special programs are suitable for offering viewers, as eccentrically positioned people whose insecurity is further increased by disruptive situations, an existential “ground” under their feet through the familiar form and for conveying security. Hermeneutic sociology of knowledge would do well to focus its analyses of audiovisual texts on the aesthetic dimension and its functions—especially where art in the narrower sense is not concerned, but everyday aesthetic forms.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

Jere Surber, Culture and Critique. An Introduction To The Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1998). Surber 1998, 4. Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Functional Purposelessness. The “Practical Meaning” of Aesthetics,” in The Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences and the Arts (Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 69), ed. Michael Barber and Jochen Dreher (Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, and London: Springer International, 2014), 78 f. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 1944/1971), and in this tradition Tim Raupach, Die autopoietische Kulturindustrie. Moderne Massenmedien zwischen Selbsterzeugung und Warenlogik (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017). Andreas Dörner and Ludgera Vogt, Literatursoziologie. Eine Einführung in zentrale Positionen—von Marx bis Bourdieu, von der Systemtheorie bis zu den British Cultural Studies (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 173 ff. Pierre Bourdieu, Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1982). Gerhard Schulze, The Experience Society. Theory, Culture and Society Series (London: SAGE, 2007).

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Aida Bosch, Konsum und Exklusion. Eine Kultursoziologie der Dinge (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010). 9 Bertram Barth et al. (eds.), Praxis der Sinus-Milieus. Gegenwart und Zukunft eines modernen Gesellschafts- und Zielgruppenmodells (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, Die Regeln der Kunst. Genese und Struktur des literarischen Feldes (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1999). 11 Siegfried J. Schmidt, Grundriß der Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft. Band I: Der gesellschaftliche Handlungsbereich Literatur. Band II: Zur Rekonstruktion Literaturwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen in einer Empirischen Theorie der Literatur (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1980/82). 12 Gerhard Panzer, Franziska Völz and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (eds.), Beziehungsanalysen. Bildende Künste in Westdeutschland nach 1945. Akteure, Institutionen, Ausstellungen und Kontexte (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015). 13 Niklas Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” in Unbeobachtbare Welt. Über Kunst und Architektur, ed. Niklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker and Frederick Bunsen (Bielefeld: Haux, 1990), pp. 7–45, 38 f.; Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2000). 14 Alfred Schütz, “On Multiple Realities,” in Collected Papers I. Phaenomenologica (Collection Publiée Sous le Patronage des Centres d’Archives-Husserl), vol. 11, ed. M. Natanson (Dordrecht: Springer, 1962), pp. 207–59, 230 ff. 15 Alfred Schütz, “Schriften zur Musik,” in Alfred Schütz Werkausgabe. Band VII, ed. Gerd Sebald and Andreas Georg Stascheit (Konstanz: UVK, 2016). 16 Jo Reichertz and Carina Jasmin Englert, Einführung in die qualitative Videoanalyse. Eine hermeneutisch-wissenssoziologische Fallanalyse (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2011) and Christine Moritz and Michael Corsten (eds.), Handbuch qualitative Videoanalyse (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018). 17 cf. Hubert Knoblauch, “Pragmatische Ästhetik: Inszenierung, Performance und die Kunstfertigkeit alltäglichen kommunikativen Handelns,” in Inszenierungsgesellschaft. Ein einführendes Handbuch, ed. Herbert Willems and Martin Jurga (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 1998), pp. 305–24; Hans-Georg Soeffner, Die Ordnung der Rituale. Die Auslegung des Alltags, vol. 2 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2016). 18 Soeffner, Functional. 19 See also the analyses of the televisual means of presentation in Andreas Dörner, Ludgera Vogt, Matthias Bandtel, and Benedikt Porzelt, Riskante Bühnen. Inszenierung und Kontingenz—Politikerauftritte in deutschen Personality-Talkshows (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015), and Andreas Dörner and Ludgera Vogt (eds.), Wahlkampf mit Humor und Komik. Selbst- und Fremdinszenierung politischer Akteure in Satiretalks des deutschen Fernsehens (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017). 20 Soeffner, Functional, 69. 21 Jan Mukařovský, Kapitel aus der Ästhetik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1936). 22 Mukařovský, Ästhetik, 16. 23 Mukařovský, Ästhetik, 14 f. 24 Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying. A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 34 ff. 25 Soeffner, Functional, 71 f. 26 Soeffner, Functional, 72. 27 Soeffner, Functional, 75. 28 Soeffner, Functional, 75. 29 Luhmann, Weltkunst. 8

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30 Soeffner, Functional, 75. 31 Cf. on the interference-theoretical background of the argumentation Carsten Gansel, “Zu Aspekten einer Bestimmung der Kategorie ‚Störung‘—Möglichkeiten der Anwendung für Analysen des Handlungs- und Symbolsystems Literatur,” in Das Prinzip ‚Störung‘ in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Carsten Gansel and Norman Ächtler (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 35–7. 32 Soeffner, Functional, 75. 33 We would like to thank Alisa Kronberger, Deborah Wolf, and Axel Fischer for their preparatory work and description protocols, which were prepared as part of the DFGfunded project “Mediale Störungen.”

Chapter 9 T H E F R E E D OM O F K A N T ’ S L A N G UAG E O F T H E S U B L I M E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY N OV E L S A N D I T S M E TAC R I T IQU E : O N D O N D E L I L L O’ S “ W H I T E N O I SE” A N D K A R L O V E K NAU S G A A R D’ S “ T H E E N D” Miglena Dikova-Milanova

Death and the Sublime: Between Philosophy and Fiction The aesthetic concept of the sublime dwells in numerous philosophical and literary contexts and has many theoretical and fictional guises. One of the most structured, thought-provoking, and influential philosophical expositions on the sublime is that of Immanuel Kant. The sublime appears in both Kant’s critical systematic philosophy and in his earlier essayistic writings. In his early pre-critical work, Kant establishes a close link between the terror of death and the sublime.1 The sublime in Kant’s systematic transcendental philosophy, among other things, points out our ability to overcome our fear of nature’s power and to discover the inherent human predestination to moral goals. It also reveals aspects of human awareness of the limits of sensible external and internal physical reality. Overall, the Kantian sublime opens a passage toward another unknown realm, which could be associated with morality, ideas, and even death. This chapter looks into the connection between the sublime and the images of death related to this innate mind-shattering feeling. The stylistic diversity of Kant’s works on the sublime is noteworthy, especially when keeping in mind the philosopher’s reputation as a bad writer. This unflattering shortcoming is highlighted in numerous statements by various philosophers and thinkers of different backgrounds and periods.2 For instance, in his 1836 text German Studies and Kant in Particular, Thomas De Quincey describes Kant’s typical sentences as being rather overbearing and chaotic.3 Accordingly, De Quincey proceeds to compare Kant’s style of writing to the acts of “packing” and “stuffing” (De Quincey 1896: 83, 84) one’s luggage for a long trip. The final outcome of such careless use of language, according to De Quincey, is that “[e]verything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause, or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher’s taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets, of the one original sentence” (De Quincey 1896: 84).

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One of the most systematic, elaborate, and exhaustive critics of the Kantian use of language, however, appears approximately a century before De Quincey’s and almost immediately after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In 1784, Johann Georg Hamann published a short essay, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, in which he severely questions the efficacy of the language used by Kant in order to word and communicate his revolutionary transcendental turn in thinking. Hamann’s criticism is later joined by Salomon Maimon and Johann Gottfried Herder, consequently the circle of the Metacritics is born.4 One of the consequences of Kant’s often hindering and rather obscure writing style, and of his linguistic shortcomings, especially in his three Critiques, is that the philosopher’s own struggle to find the most suitable linguistic expression for his ideas is often ignored. Surprisingly enough, Kant frequently uses descriptive and even literary examples in order to illustrate and communicate his thoughts. The evolution of Kant’s aesthetics as a whole and of his views on the sublime, in particular, could be perceived also as a result of the philosopher’s linguistic quest. In his early text, Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime (1764), Kant’s aesthetic concept of the sublime is predominantly descriptive and functions mostly as a classification category that lists natural objects and emotional states under the heading of “sublime.” That is to say that, within the Kantian body of writing, the sublime functions as both a philosophical concept and an interplay of images and even short narratives. In this sense, an investigation into Kant’s search for wording could prove very productive, especially when the links between the languages of fiction and that of philosophy are sought and established. The rather inconsistent early Kantian attempts to give literary voice to the feeling and the drama of the sublime can be traced in the plots of modern and contemporary novels as well. In White Noise (1984), Don DeLillo describes the increasing anxiety of Professor Jack Gladney and his obsessive fear of death. In fact, the title of the novel White Noise in the text is revealed as a synonym of “death” (DeLillo 2011: 228). In DeLillo’s novel, the spectators’ emotions that come very close to the Kantian classical description of the feeling of the sublime are triggered by their anxious observation of an approaching dark toxic cloud, which is described as the “black billowing cloud, the airborne toxic event” (DeLillo 2011: 148). In turn, in The End (2011), Knausgaard uses both the language of fiction and the style of the philosophical essay in order to describe not only his daily struggle with life’s circumstances, but also those of early- and mid-twentieth-century Europe. Knausgaard narrates the struggle between emotions and rationality and links “the sublime in human nature” (Knausgaard 2018: 682) to the overwhelming collective feelings of fear of death and enthusiasm (Knausgaard 2018: 745). That is to say, Knausgaard addresses the violent social and cultural re-enaction of the human realization that there is a possibility for “overcoming death by not allowing it to be the ultimate end” (Knausgaard 2018: 707). Both novels outline the connection between the extreme anxiety caused by the realisation of death’s constant presence and inevitability, on the one hand, and the figure of Hitler, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Nazism. Finally, in both novels,

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the sublime fear of death awakens not so much the transcendence of the physical self and dormant ideas of universal justice and morality, but the atavistic despair, superstition, the need for survival and the toxic belief in the ritualistic power of violence. In Knausgaard’s own words, the sublime summons to life “the allure of death, the allure of destruction, the allure of total annihilation” (Knausgaard 2018: 480). Consequently, this chapter investigates how the literary texts of DeLillo’s and Knausgaard’s novels rework, ironize, retell, and reinvent the Kantian concept and narratives of the sublime. In addition, the differences and similarities between the specific languages of philosophy and fiction, which recount the sublime experiences, are brought to light. In the chapter, the sublime is regarded not so much as a purely aesthetic category, but rather as an intricate dynamic human interaction with the inner and outer world that reveals the hidden workings of emotions and thinking in moments of transgression of the known limits of reality. Ultimately, it is not a pure coincidence that traces of the sublime can be sensed in theoretical, philosophical, and fictional narratives. In both fictional and academic texts, the aspiration to reveal and, if possible, to conquer and explain the boundless and the unknown remains; the wording and narrative strategies, however, differ.

Kant and the Language of Philosophy: A. F. Bernhardi vs. the Metacritics The argument of the Metacritics proves a point.5 Namely, while wording his transcendental turn, Kant makes very specific use of the German language and therefore, the overall linguistic aspects of Kantian philosophy should not be overlooked. In other words, while aiming to disclose the foundations of the possibility of experience as clearly and as precisely as possible, Kant actually created abstract linguistic constructions that went against the rules of natural language. Consequently, the language of transcendental philosophy obscured even further our understanding of the foundations of both experience and rationality. Overall, it seems that for supporters of the Metakritik, the shaping and comprehension of everyday experience is almost entirely dependent on the language structures we use. Moreover, our theoretical judgments, which Kant defines as determined by pure rational categories, are nothing but grammatical configurations. In a certain sense, for the Metacritics, there is no pure thought that exists independently and beyond the scope of natural language. In my attempt to establish the relatedness of the languages of literature and philosophy, however, A. F. Bernhardi’s response to the criticism of the circle around the Metakritik is something especially important. An early Romantic, Bernhardi is one of the biggest defenders of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and its attitudes to language. A. F. Bernhardi’s major work on the connection between language, grammar, and philosophy is Sprachlere (1801–3). In his book, Bernhardi, inspired by both Kant and the Metacritics, sets himself the ambitious goal of creating a

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transcendental linguistics, while also including some key aesthetic and literary concepts. For Bernhardi the final aim of his text “is none other than to present language as a necessary structured whole” (Surber 2001: 159). Part of Bernhardi’s defense strategy is to put the complex Kantian conceptual apparatus, with its impressive architectonics, to the service of language and the use of language in both philosophical and literary texts. One can trace the analogies between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Bernhardi’s transcendental linguistics simply by observing the apparent affinity between the terms used by each thinker. Bernhardi’s work can be viewed as a peculiar translation of Kantian transcendental concepts into linguistic categories. Consequently, as Surber points out in his book, in Bernhardi’s Sprachlere, the Kantian “concepts” become “words,” “judgments”—“sentences,” and so on (Serber 2001: 35). In his transcendental analysis of language, another important observation made by Bernhardi concerns the nature of “linguistic signs” (Surber 2001: 162). Generally speaking, a linguistic sign is a linguistic presentation (Darstellung) of a representation (Vorstellung) that appears in our consciousness based on the workings of our cognitive faculties (2001: 34). The linguistic signs aim to communicate the representations to other members of the community. The problem, according to Bernhardi, is that great difficulty arises in practically distinguishing the already established division of representations into images and concepts, since images and concepts themselves exist in an absolute unity from which arises the indifference of the sign, which in this case is the linguistic sign. For the linguistic sign may be employed in two different directions, and thus appears on the one hand as image, on the other as concept. (Surber 2001: 163)

Respectively, the “linguistic presentations” of our imagination Bernhardi defines as “images,” while those of the understanding are referred to as “concepts” (2001: 163, 164). The imagination keeps us informed of the intuition and sensible nature; hence, the language expressions of the imagination are sensory oriented. By contrast, the understanding is inclined to present our internal “spiritual nature” (2001: 164). Poets and poetry deal with images, while philosophical prose creates and employs concepts. However, for Bernhardi, language is “the material of the presentation shared in common by the understanding and imagination” (2001: 167). Overall, the difficulty of creating a clean and continuous divergence between the use of linguistic signs as images and as concepts persists. The probability of overlapping is high due to the inherent ambiguity of language and to the common origin of the concepts and images, which is the linguistic sign. Bernhardi writes that, frequently, “the same sign must serve for imaginative and philosophical linguistic presentations”; as a result, “a predicate might have to be admitted to characterize the same thing as either a presentation of images or of concepts” (2001: 167). What can help us distinguish between the

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different uses of the linguistic signs is the overall bigger context within which the signs function (Surber 2001: 167). Contrarily, both philosophical and poetic presentations are easily distinguished from the ordinary everyday application of linguistic signs. The philosopher and the poet have the freedom to reveal new and unexpected meanings in already familiar linguistic signs. At times, the use of the language within philosophical and poetic content is “completely and thoroughly opposed to that of ordinary life” (Surber 2001: 167). That is to say, boldness, innovation, and unfamiliarity, typical in philosophical and poetic language, continuously enrich and extend the content of everyday language. Overall, the philosopher and the poet create new relationships between presentations and, hence, between words (Surber 2001: 167). While molding the word for a new intuition, or restructuring the links between already-existing linguistic signs, the philosopher might be tempted to deviate from the strict language requirements that define the domain of philosophemes and use a “term of art” (Surber 2001: 167).6 Bernhardi defines the “term of art” as a “coined word,” “neologism,” or even “technical term: Kunstwort” (Surber 2001: 167). The philosophers, like the poets, struggle with language and their quest for meaning could lead to “local and individual use of language” (Surber 2001: 167). According to Bernhardi, the “terms of art” have interesting poetic qualities as well (Surber 2001: 168). Furthermore, “every authentic philosopher has thus adorned his philosophy with ‘terms of art’” (Surber 2001: 168). It can be argued that philosophy needs the adoration of poetic and narrative elements. Bernhardi underlines even further the inherent connection between poetry and philosophy by discussing the possibility of creating hybrid texts in prose that intertwines philosophical and poetic linguistic signs and creates, as Serber puts it, “a sort of ‘synthesis’ between poetry and philosophy” (Surber 2001: 168). According to Bernhardi, the novel is one of the literary genres that are most suitable for these hybrid texts. The modern novel, the epic, and mythology manage to combine the conceptual generality of philosophy with the immediate concreteness of the intuitive images of poetry. As a result, those genres manage to accomplish a synthesis between the “real” and the “ideal” (Surber 2001: 40) and to place the textual outcome in a very tangible historical discourse. Those genres, insists Bernhardi, are able to positively influence the development of the natural language (Surber 2001: 40). The modern novel, one could then reason, continues to deliver innovative philosophical and poetic language constructions into the stream of everyday communication and popular culture. In this respect, the novels by DeLillo and Knausgaard can be read as intriguing illustrations of Bernhardi’s forecast about bringing the language of philosophy and poetry together into one complete narrative whole. Kant’s own early experiments with diverse language uses are further reflected in the plot’s construction of the two novels. In other words, DeLillo and Knausgaard develop the language of the sublime in unexpected and memorable ways. The two authors, each in his distinctive manner, rewrite the sublime and, in doing so, dismiss the weight of time and cultural changes that could have otherwise deemed obsolete the concept of the sublime.

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In Search of the Language of the Sublime Kant’s exploration into the wording of the sublime begins with images and short plots and ends, as already mentioned, with the impressive philosophical terminology of his critical project. In this chapter, the investigation into Kant’s language choices is based on Bernhardi’s distinction between concepts and images. In his Observations, as well as in the third Critique, Kant depicts one and the same cognitive representation, that of the human ability to conceive moral ideas and to be free from nature. The images from the Observations both anticipate and evoke the conceptual serenity of the transcendental wording in the Critique of the Power of Judgement. The Kantian concepts and images mirror and enrich each other in an ongoing interplay of meanings and nuances. In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant illustrates and narrates the sublime through a rich collection of poetically inspired descriptions of different sublime objects, human character types, and emotional states. One of the examples that testifies to Kant’s own use of literary language is, however, especially significant. While distinguishing between the terrifying, the noble, and the magnificent sublime emotions, Kant declares: “Deep solitude is sublime, but in a terrifying way” (Kant 2007: 25). In order to illustrate his statement, Kant attaches a footnote to the text, which contains a passage from a magazine publication. The footnote tells the story of Carazan.7 In it, Kant describes his intentions as follows: “I will only provide an example of the noble dread which the description of a total solitude can inspire, and to this end I will extract several passages from Carazan’s dream” (Kant 2007: 25). Carazan’s dream gives the sublime a literary narrative. This drama of sublime emotion is played by the main character and his experience of extreme fear followed by redemption. In other words, the sublime’s dynamics are woven into the fabric of the dream’s plot. At times, it is striking how the storyline of Carazan’s dream anticipates almost to the letter the core of the drama of the judgment of the sublime as depicted in Kant’s third Critique. Even though Kant was not the author of Carazan’s narrative, the fact that he includes it in his Observations reveals his need to exhaustively search for the exact and most eloquent linguistic expression of his philosophical findings. The question then is: what parallels could be drawn between the images and the philosophical concepts when it comes to the genesis of the Kantian language of the sublime? In Kant’s footnote, Carazan’s story begins with an exegesis on how lengthy solitude, which is caused by the loss of one’s love for other humans, can have dear consequences. The reader is informed that the wealthier Carazan got “the more did this miserly rich man bar his heart to compassion and the love of others. Meanwhile, as the love of humankind grew cold in him, the diligence of his prayers and religious devotions increased” (Kant 2007: 25). Religious steadfastness alone, however, could not save Carazan from what was about to happen. One night, while busy with his accounts and calculating his daily profit, Carazan falls asleep.

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Most notably, the image of death enters the overall context of the Kantian sublime exactly through the short story of Carazan. In the dream, the Angel of Death comes to Carazan “like a whirlwind” (Kant 2007: 25) and the rich man suffers a horribly painful blow. Carazan is extremely scared, as he realizes that this is the ultimate end of his life. In Carazan’s own words: “I was petrified as I became aware that my faith has been cast for eternity, and that to all the good I have done, nothing could be added, and from all the evil that I had done, nothing could be subtracted” (Kant 2007:25). Carazan’s realization associates the finality of effective moral action with death and dying. The Angel of Death proceeds to bring Carazan before God, that is to say, before “the throne of he who dwells in the third heaven” (Kant 2007:25), and God gives his judgment. Carazan had lived a selfish life, devoted only to himself and holding on to his possessions too veraciously, while ignoring the needs and suffering of his fellow men. Carazan has closed his heart “to the love of humankind” (Kant 2007:25), therefore in the future Carazan “shall also live alone and excluded from all communion with the eternity of creation for all eternity” (Kant 2007: 25). The double meaning of the word “eternity” in Carazan’s narrative, as both everything (multitude) and forever (duration), is also illustrated by the movement of Carazan through both space and time. Upon hearing the verdict, Carazan is lifted “by an invisible force and driven through the shining edifice of creation” (Kant 2007: 25). Carazan’s impressive flight through the entirety of creation, in which, namely, he leaves “numerable worlds behind,” takes him to “the most extreme limit of nature” (Kant 2007: 25). At the very edge of the inhabited visible world, Carazan notices, “the shadows of the boundless void sank into the abyss” (Kant 2007: 25) in front of him. The abyss is a gateway to a “fearful realm of eternal silence, solitude and darkness” (Kant 2007: 25). At the sight of the void, Carazan’s heart is filled with dread. As he begins to fall through the darkness of the abyss, he loses sight of the last visible objects, the stars, and realizes that he will travel through this emptiness forever. In Carazan’s words, “I reflected with unbearable anguish in my heart that if ten thousand years were to carry me further beyond the boundaries of everything created, I would still see forward into the immeasurable abyss of darkness without help or hope of return” (Kant 2007: 25). Overwhelmed by terror, Carazan reaches out for any actual object and wakes up. He realizes the worth of men and the need to live for others. Carazan undergoes a moral transformation triggered by his dream—that is to say, as a result of the terrifying experience of his own virtual death. The end stage of the comparison between Kantian literary and philosophical accounts of the sublime can lead to a number of corresponding images and concepts and some productive observations on the place and significance of death within the judgment about the sublime.8 The Angel of Death in Carazan’s dream relates to the workings of speculative/theoretical reason in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The abyss that appears before Carazan’s eyes is the gap that separates the workings of the speculative and practical reason, in other words, between the domains of the sensible (nature) and the supersensible (ideas/freedom). In both

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cases, the fear of death is related to the discovery of the finitude, that is to say, of the limits of the physical world. Carazan dreams that he is dying. In similar fashion, the spectator of nature in the third Critique feels an inhibition of his life flow.9 At the end of the dream, Carazan reaches out and wakes up. Within the judgment of the sublime, the spectator becomes aware of the existence of human ideas and morality, which place us above the demands of nature. As a result, the spectator’s dread and fear is replaced by the feeling of intellectual pleasure. The warning against any direct exposure to danger from the third Critique corresponds to the fact that Carazan is not actually dying, but dreaming of his own death. The discovery of the idea of the good, which one associates with both Carazan’s redemption and the discovery of human moral vocation in the third Critique, could however have some unpredictable side effects, warns Kant. As early as his Observations, Kant cautions the reader about the passionate state of enthusiasm. Kant writes that enthusiasm “signifies the state of the mind which is inflamed beyond the appropriate degree by some principle” (Kant 2007: 58). Enthusiasm could lead to outburst of political violence. The concise storyline of Carazan’s dream, I would argue, could be viewed as a literary archetypal paradigm for the plot of any novel that narrates the (Kantian) sublime. This prototypical plot could be summarized as follows: there is a fear of death, the character struggles, but overcomes the threat by discovering morality, freedom, and ideas. Nevertheless, the mentioning of enthusiasm and political violence in Kant’s own philosophical accounts on the sublime could call for a very different literary scenario altogether. The general outlines of such a plot could be: the character fears death, attempts to overcome the dread, but fails to do so. Consequently, the character turns to violence in order to relieve the mounting fear and anxiety that the realization of one’s physical finitude brings upon us.

“White noise”: The Death within While Kant, through Carazan’s dream, introduced death into the living core of our existence, DeLillo places death in the middle of our living rooms, where our television sets unassumingly and calmly spread the message about the unknown.10 Babette, the wife of Professor Jack Gladney, teaches a class in posture to elderly citizens in the basement of the local church. One evening, by sheer chance, Jack, who is the novel’s main character, sees one of Babette’s classes on the TV at their home. Babette had not told anybody that her teaching was going to be televised and so Gladney’s total surprise and shock are deeply sincere. Jack experiences a moment of total disorientation, while watching Babette’s black-and-white double, showing posture exercises on the television screen. DeLillo describes Jack’s astonishment: A strangeness gripped me, a sense of physical disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I’d seen her just an

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hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen make me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absent mother, a walker in the mists of death. If she was not dead, was I? (DeLillo 2011: 123)

The television set has the uncanny ability to open a portal between realities, to confuse, to dissolve solid bodies into black-and-white pixels, and to bring forth troubling thoughts of death. In other words, the TV set is the Kantian abyss all over again. Only this time around, there is no Angel of Death, but merely a humming electronic device. Jack voices his distrust in the inscrutable power of the TV by sharing that while watching their mom and step-mom, the children “were flushed with excitement but I felt a certain disquiet. I tried to tell myself it was only television—whatever that was, however it worked—and not some journey out of life and death, not some mysterious separation” (DeLillo 2011: 124). The puzzling abyssal qualities of the TV set are described earlier in the text. While talking about the contents of his classes, Murray Jay Siskind, a visiting professor and Jack’s friend, talks about his profound and somewhat disquieting findings on American mass culture and the hidden powers of television. As Murray reveals to Jack: “I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, selfreferring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way; I am very enthused, Jack” (2011: 60). DeLillo’s abyss is no longer spectacular and grand, but is ironically postmodern11; it creeps in among ordinary objects that are ingrained in our everyday existence and which we no longer even notice. The changed and less dramatic nature of the abyss also points up the qualities of the sublime in DeLillo’s novel. In her article on White Noise and its intertextuality, L. Barret (2001/02) writes: Postmodernism uses form to demonstrate the ineffability of the sublime. In White Noise that ineffability is located in the generic hybrid itself, but, even more importantly, it is found in the lists of brand names (‘MasterCard, Visa, American Express’, ‘Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida’), which may or may not hold mystical significance. Those names, part of novel’s white noise, remain ambiguous—gestures toward irony and mysticism. (Barret 2001/02: 111)

DeLillo’s sublime makes familiar objects—appliances, supermarkets, credit cards, cars, and their names—appear odd and ambivalent. That unsettling oscillation in the innards of trivial culture is where the abyss is to be found. The significant scaling down of the settings of the sublime, from Kant’s troubled heavens in Carazan’s dream to Gladney’s TV set in his son’s bedroom, invites the ironic to the ridiculous.12 That being so, DeLillo’s sublime does not trigger a spiritual and ethical elevation as much as it awakens our atavistic fear of death and the drive for survival. In Kant’s third Critique, culture comes to the aid of the sublime, while quieting the voice of dread and clearing the path to moral elevation. By contrast,

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in White Noise, cultural progress accommodates death by proliferating the ways in which one can die. The postmodern death is not a seldom, final, and exceptionally sublime event; it is, amusingly enough, a tangible presence lurking in the daily grind. The struggle with death becomes an ongoing daily chore for Jack Gladney and most of his family members. White Noise opens with a fairly harmless and reassuring cultural cliché of the beginning of the academic year and new students’ arrival at the university where Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies. The scene should bring forth a feeling of prosperity and status security, with wealthy parents driving shiny station wagons, while helping their offspring to move into the dormitories. Nevertheless, death is already mentioned shortly after the description of Gladney’s routine annual observation of the glamorous procession of newcomers and in the middle of Jack and Babette’s conversation about the income level of the “self-absorbed” and “highstrung” bunch of parents (DeLillo 2011: 7). A few pages later, Jack asks himself who is going to die first, he or his wife (DeLillo 2011: 17). Throughout the text, the question keeps reappearing, over and over again. This is how, from the very beginning of the novel, Jack Gladney’s confrontation with his fear of death commences. With a similarity to Carazan’s demeanor, Jack falls into moments of deep despair. While, however, Carazan seeks moral salvation, Gladney is more concerned with simply surviving and cheating death for as long as possible. Carazan’s struggle is truly sublime, while Gladney’s panic-stricken maneuvering is naïve and at times, as already mentioned, downright ridiculous. Some facts in the novel’s text attain unexpected significance, having discovered and keeping in mind Jack’s deep angst, which for the most part defines his behavioural patterns. Although Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies and Nazism, he does not speak German. As Gladney confesses, “As the most prominent figure in Hitler studies in North America, I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper” (DeLillo 2011: 36). One vaguely, but persistently, begins to wonder about Gladney’s choice to build an academic career in a domain that he could not completely master. Due to his lack of language skills, one can imagine hostile academic undercurrents and an unfortunate turn of events that could seriously threaten and damage his professional future. One possible rational answer is the fact that Hitler is a very prominent historical figure and consequently, Hitler studies have the potential to draw massive numbers of students. However, what lurks below the surface of Jack Gladney’s labored rationality? DeLillo reveals the answer gradually and in an entertaining and darkly ironic manner. In this respect, a joint lecture is especially revealing, during which Gladney talks about Hitler, while Murray talks about Elvis’ struggles with popularity. As the simultaneously told stories of Hitler’s and Elvis’ lives gather momentum, certain notable parallels begin to emerge. It becomes clear that the crowds rallying at Hitler’s speeches and Elvis’ concerts came together because of their collective fear of death. People gather to seek shared protection from death, and in doing so, a special ritualistic group behavior takes center stage.

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The idea is simple; the more people one kills, the further death is kept from the perpetrator and his community. Those crowds have different motives from the people gathered by the Kantian enthusiasm for the good. However, the final outcome is one and the same, violence. As Professor Gladney puts it: “Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying: To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to become a crowd” (DeLillo 2011: 87). This striking-in-its-simplicity atavistic way of making history, while providing a group protection from death, is repeated in a memorable episode from Gladney’s private life. Early one morning, Jack awakens only to see a strange white-haired old man sitting in his garden. Jack endures long agonizing moments of fear, thinking that the old man in the garden is Death and has come to collect him. Jack talks about his ordeal, “He was there in the wicker armchair on the wet grass. I opened the inner door and then the storm door. I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach” (DeLillo 2011: 280–1). After a few dreadful moments, Jack realizes that not Death, but his father-in-law, is sitting in the armchair. Significantly enough, Jack uses Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as a shielding talisman against Death. This book, by one of the most dreadful and successful mass murderers in human history, is an object that, by some ritualistic logic, should have had the reverse effect on Death and exorcise it from Jack’s life and garden. Killing as a method for shielding the killer from death is listed by Murray as one plausible death aversion technique. In Murray’s words, using Hitler as a shield is an understandable choice, because “some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death” (DeLillo 2011: 330). Jack, however, clings onto Hitler in a twofold and somewhat ineffective way. Murray clarifies Jack’s mistake: “On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength. I sense a confusion of means. Not that I am criticizing. It was a daring thing you did, a daring thrust. To use him” (DeLillo 2011: 331). As Murray puts it, there “are numerous ways to get around death” (DeLillo 2011: 331). To stand out and to hide are two reasonably good techniques for death aversion. However, one of the most effective methods for death evasion is murder. In Murray’s words: I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions. (2001: 333–4)

Jack reaches the astonishing-in-its-simplicity revelation that “men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others” (DeLillo

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2011: 334). Murray confirms the gruesome conclusion by spelling out the stunning plainness of the bargaining power of murder. Murray encourages Jack to be bolder: “Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier. Let him replace you, theoretically, in that role. You can’t die if he does. He dies, you live. See how marvellously simple” (DeLillo 2011: 334). Death is omnipresent in White Noise, which could explain the efforts that the characters invest to escape it. Even scientific discoveries multiply the possibility of a lethal accident. Jack Gladney experiences one of the newly developed forms of death first-hand. In the second part of the novel, DeLillo describes the occurrence of a major chemical incident and its consequences for Jack and his family. The local radio announces that a toxic cloud has been released near Jack’s hometown (DeLillo 2011: 134). Initially nobody panics, but when the enormous dark airborne mass begins to draw near, the neighborhood is advised to evacuate (DeLillo 2011: 135–6). The spectacle of the approaching cloud, its size, speed, and dynamics evoke in Jack and other observers a feeling that closely resembles that of the Kantian sublime. Jack and his family are in awe. At the same time, they feel a growing admiration for the approaching toxic bulk. The night has fallen: The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armoured creatures with spiral wings. We weren’t sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. … This was death made in a laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject of control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of man-made event. (DeLillo 2011: 148, 149)

The sublime threat becomes very real to Jack when he has to get out of the car and refuel (DeLillo 2011: 148). The cloud is too close to the gas station and Jack inhales a life-threatening amount of the toxic element Nyodene Derivative (Nyodene D.). This is how Jack begins to die for real. Jack decides to take Murray’s advice about killing to heart and ventures into murdering Babette’s alleged lover. Babette is cheating on Jack with a supplier of the experimental drug Skyler, which she badly needs in order to supress her own unbearable fear of death. Jack decides that he can postpone his own death by simply killing the lover, Willie Mink. Jack is able to trace Mink, who lives in a motel in Germantown (DeLillo 2011: 344, 345). Jack shoots at him twice, Mink is wounded but survives the assault (DeLillo 2011: 359, 360). In turn, the badly wounded Mink manages to shoot Jack in the wrist (DeLillo 2011: 360). Jack begins

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to feel remorse for his outrageous behavior and compassion for Mink (DeLillo 2011: 360). Finally, while bleeding himself, Jack succeeds in getting Mink into a car. Gladney finds medical help in a small clinic, which is a part of a strange rundown German-speaking convent (DeLillo 2011: 362–3). An old doctor and several grumpy nuns who, as it turns out, do not believe in God (DeLillo 2011: 366) take care of the wounded. The novel ends with Jack looking at the spectacular sunsets from a hilltop near his house (DeLillo 2011: 372–4). He has learned to bear his fate. The plot of the sublime in White Noise both deviates from, and follows, Kant’s original story. Finally, Jack Gladney abandons his inclination to use violence in favor of the much less proactive contemplation of nature. Kant’s morally better scenario seems to have won.

“The End”: The Inner Sublime The language use and plot structure of Knausgaard’s The End come very close to Bernhardi’s eighteenth-century expectations about the evolved novel, which should be a mixture of historical, philosophical, and literary narratives. The End contains chapters written in different styles that vary from autobiographical fiction to essayistic.13 Overall, the novel reads as an attempt to explain and tame the destructive forces set free by the regular awakenings of the inner sublime. For Knausgaard, the abyss is within us. In this last, sixth part of his autobiographical series My Struggle, Knausgaard narrates different aspects of the sublime, while relating them to the fear of death and to historical and political violence.14 The novel’s autobiographical chapters take turns to relate Knausgaard’s personal life story and reveal his own inner struggles with feelings of loneliness, rejection, doubt, and isolation. However, he seeks and finds solace in writing and within the protective private circle of his family life. In contrast, the impressively long chapter “The Name and the Number”15 is an analysis of the tragic European history between the two world wars and of Hitler’s early hardships and rise to power in an impoverished and divided Germany. The chapter contains an in-between styles narrative with direct and concealed references to philosophical and critical texts, to biographies and autobiographies. In the novel, Knausgaard seems to insist that when confronted with the fear and the irresistible call of death, one has the freedom to choose a course of action. Art and violence are the two most common escape routes. Hitler fails to make art his permanent vocation and in the trenches of the First World War a monstrous European future is shaped. Knausgaard chooses writing with all its insecurity, setbacks, and personal adversities. Each personal choice echoes the fate of millions. One of Knausgaard’s descriptions particularly evokes the feeling of the sublime, almost as depicted in Kant’s third Critique. Knausgaard is on holiday with his family in Venice, when he witnesses something remarkably out of ordinary: an enormous cruise ship glides by.16 Shortly before seeing the boat, the author comes to an interesting realization about the hidden essence of beauty, which one could

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observe in the seventeenth- and nineteenth-century paintings hanging on the walls of the Accademia Gallery of Venice. Knausgaard concludes: “The beauty of the paintings was the beauty of death, the insight that they awoke in us was in what was dead and nothing else” (Knausgaard 2018: 631). The day’s encounters with the realm of the unknown continued with his coming across the grandeur of the tourist ship. In Knausgaard’s words: The same day I saw something utterly sublime and quite different to anything else on that trip. … The ship was indeed gigantic, towering above the city, passengers milling on all its decks. A loudspeaker voice blared out tourist information, and the air was a glitter of flashing cameras. Something welled inside me. A shiver ran down my spine. (Knausgaard 2018: 631)

Knausgaard continues his story, while changing his style to essayistic and looking for an answer that could explain why the ship made him think of the sublime. He refers to what he calls “the classical aesthetics,” the definitions of which come close to the Kantian definition of sublime emotion. Traditionally, writes Knausgaard, the sublime is associated with, and provoked by, the sudden awareness of the “magnificent or unfamiliar nature” (Knausgaard 2018: 632) of an object or an event. The author also evokes the familiar from the third Critique, grandeur of the sublime phenomenon, which makes the spectator feel “small or inconsequential” (Knausgaard 2018: 632). The sensation of one’s own insignificance is what calls forwards the ideas of the inhuman and of the divine. For Knausgaard however, the sublime and the divine are two very different notions. The divine, and only the divine, states the author, opens the doors to the possibility of the “we.” That is to say, to the collective human community which in its turn gives “a promise for cohesion and belonging” (Knausgaard 2018: 632). Through increasing disregard for religion, “we closed the door on something inside ourselves too” (Knausgaard 2018: 632). In this respect, while compared to the mysticism of the holy, the sublime “is only a faint echo” of it (Knausgaard 2018: 633). What remains of the holy is the melancholy for its loss, which the Romantic art expresses. After the loss of the holy and the divine, what is left is the feeling of “the sudden swell of joy and grief ” when we come into contact with “something unexpected or something commonplace in an unexpected way” (Knausgaard 2018: 632). Among such objects, whose strangeness allows us to see the hidden reality are, Knausgaard insists, a “cruise ship thick with people, an industrial landscape mantled by snow, the red sun that illuminates it through a curtain of mist” (Knausgaard 2018: 263). Those unexpected images make us rethink the familiar in ourselves and the world around us. They open a passage to another hidden dimension, exactly as within the Kantian sublime. Knausgaard writes: When I see the image in my mind’s eye I am transported there, and with all my being I become aware not only of my own existence, but of my own self, for a brief

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moment it floods my consciousness, and in those few moments I am quite oblivious to my own problems, the things I have done or need to do, the people I know, have known or will know in the future, and everything that connects me to the social world is gone. (Knausgaard 2018: 634)

Those brief moments of disconnectedness bring a sensation of the presence of another hidden realm and inaccessible knowledge. Those moments remind us of Kant’s account of Carazan’s feeling of sublime solitude. These experiences, however, continues Knausgaard, are insignificant compared to the mystical adoration of the divine (Knausgaard 2018: 634). What remains, after those brief raptures, is the daily struggle for meaning and the hope for a glimpse at what lies underneath, at what could be “out there” (Knausgaard 2018: 635). The search for meaning brings, in Knausgaard’s case, a realization of the presence of “a kind of a shadow that blanketed my existence, the logical conclusion of which was what might be described as a passive yearning for death” (Knausgaard 2018: 635). The only remaining place where one can sense the fullness of life is art (Knausgaard 2018: 635), concludes Knausgaard. In art, the sublime’s revelation of the presence of the hidden layer of the real could still be sensed and admired. After the loss of the divine, which could tame the ferocity of human character, one other aspect of the sublime persists throughout European history. This sublime, as Knausgaard describes it, is the dangerously fierce in us: This is the sublime in human nature, the wild and uncontrolled, the destructive aspect of our make-up that can be bridled neither by the individual nor by the structures of our social world, arisen in that one (Cain—my remark) human, who is all of us. The sublime in the one. But the sublime is also in the all, when we are one together, congregated in teeming numbers. The roar of a football crowd, the flow of mass protest on the streets. Common to these two instances of the sublime in human nature is that both edge towards the place where what is individual and peculiar to the one ceases to exist. The place where our humanity dissolves into other forces of nature and loses itself. This is the boundary of the “I,” and it is the boundary of our culture, and as such it is justifiably feared. (Knausgaard 2018: 683)

Culture exists in order to protect us from the “mute” and the “blind” (Knausgaard 2018: 683) that lie beneath the edges of our contemporary visible world. Death is a portal to the unknown from which we came and where we will return. In this respect, according to Knausgaard, this land to which we are led by death “lies beyond language, beyond thought, beyond culture, and cannot be grasped but merely glimpsed” (Knausgaard 2018: 683). Very much like DeLillo in White Noise, for Knausgaard the presence of death and the awareness of the land beyond are an inherent part of our everyday lives. Death is “there always, even when we are having breakfast on a normal Tuesday morning and the coffee is rather too strong, the rain is running down the windowpanes, the radio is sending out the seven o’clock news, and the living-room floor inside is littered with toys” (Knausgaard 2018: 683).

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This is why we need protection from revelations of the constant presence of death and the unknown. We need ways to avoid the sublime, one could argue. For Knausgaard, the joining of the “we” of a community with a shared purpose is one way to escape the fear and awareness of the beyond. Yet even the longing for community cannot prevent fear and violence from entering our lives. In Knausgaard’s account, Hitler manipulated exactly this inherent yearning for the “we” and to belong. Hitler abused the enthusiasm of the masses and used its power (2018: 745) to summon political cruelty and perpetuate death. Hitler electrified the gathered crowds. Knausgaard writes about Hitler’s success as a public orator: His charisma as a speaker lay very much in the sense he gave that here was a man who said things the way they were, and the trust he thereby gained from his audiences, who in expressing their enthusiasm for him were also expressing their enthusiasm for themselves; the unity he thereby created, was an unprecedented force he discovered himself able, like a magician, to direct wherever he wanted. (Knausgaard 2018: 745)

The audiences also assembled around Hitler in the name of the dead German soldiers of the First World War, looking for ways to restore the honor of their defeated country (Knausgaard 2018: 712). This is why Knausgaard, in a manner very similar to DeLillo, defines Nazism as a macabre “death cult” and “warrior cult” (Knausgaard 2018: 712). For Knausgaard, as well as for Kant and DeLillo, the enthusiasm of the crowds is a dangerous ally when it comes to quieting the deep human impulse to mislead and escape death. The muted and unknown realm of death is where the utter human desire for the absolute leads us as well. The enthusiastic longing of the crowds is also an urge for the absolute. As Knausgaard puts it: The absolute may be reached only by the emotions. The absolute belongs to religion, mythology and the irrational. The absolute is what propels someone to die for a cause greater than himself, faith in the absolute was once the foundation of the law. The absolute is death, emptiness, nothingness, darkness. The absolute is the background against which life is lived. (Knausgaard 2018: 838)

Knausgaard, like Kant and DeLillo, is fully aware of the treacherous abyss that lies open below our reality and of the precarious balance that keeps this reality intact. This is why embedded in our culture chain of “heroism, violence, death” (Knausgaard 2018: 839) propels the damaging effects of the sublime in us, Knausgaard argues.17 Art however, as Knausgaard keeps pointing out, is one of the few safe and authentic ways to seek knowledge while venturing into the unknown territory of death and the absolute. Fiction could relatively safely “draw the unknown into the known” (Knausgaard 2018: 655) and “investigate how ideas and the immaterial

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manifest themselves in the material … in the bodies and objects that exist here at this moment” (Knausgaard 2018: 410). In his turn, Hitler misused the crowds’ need for authenticity, and being himself familiar with the powerful potential of art, “inserted fiction into material reality and made reality a play, binding the individual human to a mask” (Knausgaard 2018: 844). Hitler mixed the reality of history with fiction. That is to say, Nazism placed a yearning for the absolute in the public communal realm of the “we,” while it should have stayed in the realm of the artistic singular “I.” Consequently, in Knausgaard’s words, “Nazi Germany was the absolute state” (Knausgaard 2018: 842). Knausgaard’s story of the sublime is related in images and concepts and, while following the general outlines of the Kantian paradigm, displays some significant alterations. For Kant, the utmost final goal of the experience of the sublime is the discovery of one’s ability for moral ideas and morally guided actions. In Knausgaard’s story of the sublime, art takes over morality, when it comes to the concrete image—and object-bound expression of ideas and the unknown. Still, in explicitly internalizing the sublime emotion, Knausgaard reconfirms Kant’s own topology of the sublime, which operates within the interiors of pure reason. Finally, while Carazan’s dream is told entirely in the tradition of Christian religious imagery where the divine takes a central stage, Kant’s later transcendental philosophy places God somewhat second to pure human rationality. In this respect, it is significant to observe that in both DeLillo’s and Knausgaard’s narratives on the sublime, one can sense certain nostalgia for the lost cultural significance of the holy and the divine that kept the balance within the human community intact. Carazan’s dream and the two contemporary novels prove that the search for the language of the sublime is an ever-ongoing quest for the right expression of the unknown. As far as death is not modern, nor is extinguished, the search for the language that could silence, or adequately convey, the voices of dread will continue. After all, the sublime is not modern either.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

The connection between the experience of the sublime and death is made in Kant’s work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764). Among the most memorable contemporary criticisms on Kant’s skills as a writer are those of D. Parfit, T. O’Keefe, and E. Thacker. On De Quincey’s criticism of Kant’s style of writing see J. Luftig’s article “Style: De Quincey on Kant” in “Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms: ACLA Conference 2010 New Orleans LA,” 2010. In his Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German Idealism (2001), the American academic and philosopher J. P. Surber gives a detailed and in-depth description of the writings and ideas of the so-called Metacritics. The book contains translations from the original German texts of the Metacritics—of J. G. Hamann, S. Maimon, J. G. Herder, A. F. Bernhardi, and A. F. Schlegel, into English. The core of the criticism of the Metacritics is well summarized in J. Surber’s book (2001) on Metakritik as follows: “For Metakritik, in the most general sense, was

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Philosophy, Freedom, Language nothing less than an attack, not just on the specific philosophical doctrines of Kantian Transcendental Idealism, but on the implicit linguistic assumptions operative in their very articulation. That is, the basic point of the Metakritik was that, whatever else Kantian transcendental philosophy might be, it must at least be a set of specific linguistic practices and constructions, a sort of ‘languagegame’ one might say today, concerning the ‘grounds of the possibility’ of which it should be, in a way completely paralleling Kant’s own argument, fully appropriate to inquire. Of course, the critical point was not that the ‘transcendental game’ could not be played; rather, it was that it could not have the significance which it claimed for itself—that is, to constitute a final and complete presentation and analysis of the “the grounds of the possibility of experience” (Surber 2001: 11). In Surber’s (2001) book, the “Philosophemen,” i.e., the “philosophemes,” are generally defined as “philosophical terms” (Surber 2001: 165) and as “philosophical concepts” (Serber 2001: 38). The short text about Carazan’s dream is from the Bremisches Magazin zur Ausbreitung der Wissenschaften und Kunst und Tugend. Von einigen Liebbebern derselben aus den englischen Monatschiften gesammelt und berausgegeben, vol. 4 (1761), p. 539. In the third Critique, the concept of the sublime is introduced through the workings of the aesthetic reflective judgement about the sublime. See the chapter “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement” (2000: 89–230). In the third Critique, Kant writes that the pleasure of the sublime “arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers” (2000: 128, 129). On the topics of technological disasters and mortality in DeLillo’s novels see Maffey R. and Y. Teo, “Changing Channels of Technology: Disaster and (Im)mortality in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Cosmopolis and Zero K,” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, vol. 6, no. 2 (2018). On the concept of the “postmodern sublime” and DeLillo’s White Noise, see J. Tabbi’s book “Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk,” CUP, 1995. On the ridiculous sublime in White Noise, see also the articles of N. Behrooz and H. Pirnajmudin, “The ridiculous sublime in don DeLillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis” (2016). DeLillo’s sublime in White Noise is also defined as “technological,” “nostalgic,” and “American.” See respectively the articles of J. Hanneberg, “Something Extraordinary Hovering Just Outside Our Touch”: The Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” (2011) and of N. Behrooz and H. Pirnajmudin, “The Nostalgic Sublime in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis” (2018). See also the PhD thesis of J. Collins, “Reconfigurations of the American Sublime in the Fiction of Joan Didion, Don DeLillo and Paul Auster” (2012) [October 06, 2019] at: http://hdl. handle.net/11375/12352. At the end of his novel, Knausgaard includes a bibliography of the used and quoted philosophical and critical texts. The listed books include works of H. Arendt, J. Derrida, E. Levinas, J. Joyce, P. Celan, and many others. My Struggle (Min Kamp) is an autobiographical series of six novels written by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard and published in the original language between 2009 and 2011. The last sixth part, The End, is published in English in 2018. The novels are translated into more than twenty languages and have received many Norwegian and international book awards.

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15 The chapter begins on p. 395 and ends at p. 849. The chapter’s length is exactly 454 pages. Knausgaard’s impressive writing skills and his direct style make it an intriguing and thought-provoking read. 16 A possible intertextual link, between DeLillo’s comparison of the toxic cloud to “some death ship in a Norse legend” (DeLillo 2011: 148) and Knausgaard’s own experience of the sublime after his encounter with the cruise ship in Venice, could be established. 17 In The End, Knausgaard relates the longing for the absolute and the detachment from reality it creates to the Utøya massacre, which took place on July 22, 2011, on the island of Utøya, Norway. See p. 839.

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Chapter 10 “I N T E R SE C T IO N S : M E M O RY A N D T H E P O L I T IC S O F P AT R I M O N Y I N D A N I E L B U R E N ’ S D E U X P L AT E AU X ” Shaw Smith

Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; Book II, ch. 1 Daniel Buren’s Deux Plateaux (1985–6), an installation which created a grand controversy when it was first inaugurated in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, now faces a new challenge in the first decades of the new century: its very existence was put into question by the French government under Jacques Chirac as well as by the artist himself. My hope is that this article may in some small way help to continue to protect Buren’s columns which were and perhaps still are in danger of being literally turned into dust. The government declared that its plan was to “tolerate rather than to destroy it,” in 1986, but that policy has led to such a degraded site that even Buren was about to dismantle the piece (“vandalism by the state” as he called it). Fortunately there have been some efforts to restore parts of it in 2008 (see bibliography below), but since then there has been precious little serious analysis about the work. In contrast to those who would criticize it as elitist, as well as in contrast to those who interpret it more formally and mathematically, this paper offers a “playful roaming” by analyzing the installation’s merits through a semiotic reading of the historical associations, its example of epistemological freedom and memory, and its contemporary relevance and expectations for modern citizenship. This installation is shown to provide an accessible image of hope for individual freedom and collective responsibility through a new contingent, dynamic approach to memory and history and place inspired by the work of Pierre Nora (1989). It includes the flashing semiotics of French film-making, the historical model of Michel Nuridsany (1993), the mathematical model of Guy Lelong (2002), as well as the rhizome metaphor of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) and is framed by Umberto Eco’s theory of the limitations of interpretation (1992). This public

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act of remembering and forgetting both royalist imperatives as well as republican and revolutionary narratives is conveniently and politically conditional by its very nature as Pierre Nora has written in terms of “memory and history.” These contingently evoked images of hope are based upon a symbolic, virtual grid of French Cartesian thinking represented in the variable Columns which roam from the evocations of the ancient stone alignments at Carnac to the dazzling aerial force of the Concorde in the Columns’ call to remember or else to be enslaved. While the article focuses on one monument by one artist, Buren’s work, by its ironically ephemeral nature, evokes a whole range of French visual culture and empowers a new way of remembering and thinking about national patrimony with its very fuzzy borders. One of the great tests of scholarship is its legacy and affirmation that mutually excavate and build new constructions of consciousness. It is in that spirit of “thinking about thinking” that I dedicate this article to my friend and colleague, Professor Jere Surber, whose dynamic leadership and insightful, engaged, wideranging scholarship serve as a model to many of us and especially to me. A man with a bad memory has nothing to rely on, everything plays him false. Eugène Delacroix, Journal, January 25, 1824 Publicly praised by the Socialist government of President François Mitterrand, temporarily halted in 1986 by the conservative government of the Paris mayor and then Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and openly ridiculed by much of the citizenry of France, then restored under President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, Daniel Buren’s Deux Plateaux (1985–16) offers an index of the “cohabitation” of the French government and its art and politics in the very heart of Paris in the decades at the turn of the century.1 Following the turbulent first decade of its fragile existence, it faced a challenge to its very survival during the opening decades of the new millennium. Even Buren himself suggested that the work be dismantled because of its poor maintenance by the State which he accuses of passive “vandalism,” a result of its official neglect of the courtyard site. This apparent indifference to the Palais Royal installation has happened even in the very year which produced that glamorous show of the glitzy Neo-Pop images of American artist Jeff Koons within the hallowed golden confines of the great palace at Versailles.2 This paper, based upon archival material related to this site, a semiotic analysis, many visits to the site, and a brief discussion with the artist in 1988, defends this sometimes unpopular, but profoundly “populist,” sculptural environment in the main courtyard of the Palais Royal against charges of elitism and nihilism that have been regularly directed toward contemporary art, especially in France. It posits the historical context of the work, analyzes its function as an institutional critique, assesses aspects of its reception, and offers an alternative reading to its public criticism. A study of Buren’s work written by Michel Nuridsany, Daniel Buren au Palais-Royal: “Les Deux Plateaux,” 1993, referenced some of the historical evidence, such as the importance of the cafés that were located under the arcades of the Palais Royal during the French Revolution, which I would like to reconsider here on a much more expanded basis. More recently, Guy Lelong, in Daniel Buren, 2002 (English Edition), focused on a mathematical model with a set of ratios in a section of his book which is devoted to the Buren’s work at the Palais Royal.

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Using what Lelong calls a “reading device,” that requires the viewer to operate onsite in order to conduct a “genuine investigation,” he analyzes the “virtual cube” found in the “virtual plateaux” that he constructs based primarily on the polygonal structure of the columns. Lelong concludes that his formal Cartesian model “does not preclude a more playful roaming,” and that is just what I want to suggest here, a more playful, semiotic roaming.3 These “flashes of visual memories” associated with the site which I will evoke are necessarily “telegraphic” in terms of the brevity of my discussion of any individual work. Such remembered images, these flashes of memory, are based on what I would call a “cinematic semiotic,” and are intended to suggest here yet another key aspect of the landscape of French visual culture, namely French film and the legacy of the Lumière brothers. Moreover, the point is not that ç=ç, but that these correspondences, to use Baudelaire’s term, evoke meanings and memories rather than presenting a hermetically sealed case of equivalence. In fact, the rigorous Cartesianism of the site itself is a fundamentally symbolic dynamic of the act of the retrieval of historical memory, parallel narratives, and multiple interpretations of the Deux Plateaux. A special intersection. The installation, described in absolute detail by Lelong, consists of 260 freestanding, grayish-black marble (from the French Pyrénées) and white-striped marble (from Italian Carrara quarries) columns (varying from approximately one to six feet high), and grayish-black and white-striped shades in the windows of the second story of the palace. Within this space there are also a series of 200 red and green lights, many of which have stopped functioning, at the junctures of the lines that map out the squared series of columns. Beneath this grid of nearly 3000 square meters, circulates an underground canal. At one time this current had stopped but is now, thanks to a restoration of the site begun in 2008, once again is functioning as flowing water. The canal is covered by a grate that is lighted with a blue tone in the darkness—revealing two plateaux: the surface and the subterranean. The restoration, which was supported by the government (6 million Euros/$8.59 million) and Groupe Eiffage (500,000 Euros/$575,000), a large French civil engineering construction company, was enabled by a change in government which classified the site as an “Historical Monument.” This restoration included “resurfacing of the courtyard, new electronics, and a brand new water network.”4 The sharply planar arrangement of the columns on the surface is gently softened by the faint murmur of the water once again. This soft stream flows through the H-shaped subterranean canals producing an ordered, calming quality which conceptually suggests a formal comparison with the classically ordered, stoic seventeenth-century landscapes of Nicolas Poussin.5 However, located in the courtyard of the seventeenth-century palace, this grid also summons a vast assortment and series of evocative historical allusions, what I shall call a New Classicism. The “New Classicism,” as found, for example, in Edward Fry’s catalogue of dokumenta 8, 1987, and Charles Jencks’s Post-Modernism: The New Classicism, 1987, constructs culture as a heterogeneous account of the knowledge of existence as a temporary, but necessary fiction. With this contingent fact, culture retains the idea of liberation through knowledge. At the same time, it refrains from

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authenticating ideas as “received ideas” in the form, for example, of François Rude’s historicizing, heroic monument, La Marseillaise, 1833. This New Classicism seeks to be inclusive, interactive, and participatory rather than directive and absolute, except in terms of the moral imperative of individual freedom, a “second plateau.”6, 7, 8, 9 That is to say that “I think therefore I am” is thus transcribed into “I doubt therefore I am,” that is, an implicit refusal to accept “idées reçues” or “received ideas.”10 This interventionist strategy by Buren assaults the monolithic construct of classicism as formerly signified by the Palais Royal. The palace was originally constructed for and by Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), his “Eminence rouge” in 1629. Renaming himself after a family estate in the Loire, Cardinal Richelieu (“rich place”) envisioned his own utopian, ideal city. But Buren offers an alternative view, a counter-tactic to the history embodied in the seventeenth-century palace. He undermines the specialization of knowledge, the major project of the Enlightenment, by suggesting other histories en lieu of the Cardinal’s. The approach, as Buren suggests, also calls into question the very nature of representation because of the authority and control of visual images. Put in more familiar terms, history is viewed as a construct to be realized and not as a “thing” separate from its maker. As with the Rude piece, the comparison of Sol LeWitt’s Modular Cube (1965) and the Buren work manifests still other differences in terms of closure and totalities. The LeWitt is the Platonic realization of a Cartesian ideal while Buren’s work, with its emphasis on Pascalian intuition, synecdoche, tracings, transformation, and contradiction, provokes “playful roaming” without achieving the act of a false completion. While LeWitt himself acknowledged that “Art is pure information,” Robert Rosenblum, whose contributions in the field of late eighteenth-century classicism are well known, has recognized the idealized completed-ness of LeWitt’s work when he observed that “If anyone could perceive the structural beauty of say, Descartes or Kant’s treatises and then go on to re-create them as exclusively visual metaphors, it is surely LeWitt.”11 Edward Bell sees détournement, meaning a diversion or turning aside, as a strategy of the situationists like Buren who, in the Paris of May 1968, used “the politics of double reading, or palimpsest” in which the fragments operate “superimposed onto another field, still legible beneath it.”12 Buren was a détourniste from his early “Man/Sandwich” (1968) to his “Métro: Palais Royal” (1970). It was hoped that this so-called “Stripe Art” would reshape the “surrounding environment of advertising and architecture into an uncanny relief, dismantling its claims to naturalness.”13 Buren clearly identifies with the situationists’ slogan, “The power is in the street,” because he felt that most art had become “cannibalized by ‘official’ art production.”14 The challenge for détournement in Buren’s commission to evoke lost or hidden stories in the cold, virtually unvisited, imperial center of Paris in 1985, was obvious. By using détournement¸ Buren engages a weapon against the “society of the spectacle” which is the “glue that holds society together in the rapture of, precisely, spectatorship, fixated on a procession of things.”15 First of all, détournement offers the possibility of reclaiming public space as in the “Within and Beyond the Frame”

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(New York, 1973) and “Watch the Doors, Please!” (Chicago, 1980) both by Buren. Secondly, it offers the opportunity to establish the “heterotopia,” specified by JeanFrançois Lyotard as here in Buren’s “Points of View or Corridorscope” (Paris, 1983) and his “French Pavilion” (Venice, 1986). This “babbling of languages” proclaims no single sense of cardinal authorship. But like Georges Seurat’s pointillist system or Jasper John’s repetitive flags, quickly and I believe problematically, “Stripe Art” risks becoming an index of Buren himself with its signature, systematic non-colors of grayish/black and white. Fortunately, in the Palais Royal Buren provides us with only the schematic ruins of the classical Cartesian system. With these vestiges of rational order and constraint, we may or may not reconstruct such structures for ourselves by a rewriting of histories which have been marginalized by some of the former occupants of the Palais Royal. For example, the system of columns/polygons on the grid frames this reclamation with silent warnings about the xenophobic nature of French Cartesianism as an encyclopedic “table of knowledge.” It presents itself as a non-pictorial reference to the confident rationalism of the Grand Manner in the French tradition. At the same time, its evocations point to a memento mori, or vanitas, of the systems of the absolutism. For example, its plan and variable columns visually suggest the former arrogance of the ancient ruins of a Roman Forum which construct the “present” as well as the “past” by ironically claiming the invincibility of “naturalness.”16 While this appeal for a new consciousness evokes a bracketed, but purposely and almost indeterminate range of responses and reflections about the national heritage, Le Patrimoine, there are boundaries as Umberto Eco defined in his analysis of the limits of interpretation (1994). One might say that on one hand there is Eco’s notion of limits, while on the other there is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s use of the “rhizome,” as described in their A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Their conception of the “rhizome” is that it is a field of information which functions like cartography or the World Wide Web into which you can enter at any point and create your own path. It has “no set pathway … and yet can link together heterogeneous elements.” (See Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980, Oxford, 2010, pp. 32–3 who point to the Keith Tyson piece, Large Field Array, 2006–7, as an example.) I am suggesting that both are contingently valid in the interpretation of Buren’s Deux Plateaux. This contingent bracketing, nonetheless, can shift its visual memory from its prehistoric origins of France in the alignments of Carnac in Brittany … [FLASH] … to the overthrow of French imperialism in Morocco in the pillars of the court in Rabat, which honor the Sultan who claimed independence from the French  … to the quartier, “Deux Plateaux” (Cocody district) in Abidjan, which was the center of the French colonization of the Ivory Coast in 1934 … [FLASH] … to the nature of French hierarchical thinking that includes subterranean Paris, as described by Hugo and as shown here in a view of the sewers and

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powerful water guilds of Paris, which played such an important role in the history of the nation. [FLASH] … A history seen in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, 1862 in which Jean Valjean is sometimes shown as he wanders through the underground labyrinth. This history includes the sewers of Paris which served the eighteenth-century revolutionists and the twentieth-century maquis (resistance fighters), as well as the irascible Countess Aurelia in Jean Giraudoux’s play, La Folle de Chaillot, 1943, (“The Madwoman of Chaillot”), who used the underground tunnels to destroy the predatory oil capitalists …

The reconstructed history of the Palais Royal is at once both revolutionary and royalist. For it was within the arcades of the Palais Royal at the Café de Foy, (where, for example, the painter Eugène Delacroix often went for “ices”) and the Café des Mille Colonnes (or “Cafe of a Thousand Columns”), an eighteenth-century ice cream shop, that a young revolutionary, Camille Desmoulins, first called the French people to take up arms against oppression.17 But after the revolution, the Palais Royal remained an important site of the monarchy during the reign of Louis Philippe. As T. J. Clark suggests, some “site-specific works can become classspecific.”18 Here Buren has again dealt with another kind of plateau. With his nonsculpture (what Lelong calls a non-monumental work within a monumental site), Buren has taken a class-specific site and created a non-class specific site. By calling for a different form of awareness that is both royalist and populist rather than a history of a particular class, Buren creates a more inclusive “sculptural integration” to use Lelong’s term.19 This seems to me to be what Buren suggests to be the intellectual mission of our day, one that should be directed toward an institutional critique of hierarchy which establishes associations and commonalities rather than differences which naturalize power structures. This dialogical interventionism also conjures up the French dream of flight as symbolized through the opposing rows of red and green runway lights. From Watteau and his flights of Cytherean fantasy in the eighteenth century to the flights of the Montgolfier brothers in their balloon which first arose in 1783 from the palace and garden of Les Tuilleries near the Palais Royal, we are magically reminded of the origins of the French contributions to flight. In our remembered visions of the nineteenth century, from Napoleon (who seems to have lost his virginity under the arcades of the Palais Royal thanks to the many prostitutes strolling there) and his plans to invade England by air, to Nadar and his aerial views of Paris, to the global visions of Jules Verne, to the salvation of Paris by the surveillance of military balloons as commemorated in paintings by Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98), we see Proustian flashes of how the French have always dreamed of and invented ways to fly. And in the twentieth century, from George Méliès’ film Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) and Louis Blériot (1832–1936) and his early twentieth-century flights across the channel in 1909 … [FLASH]. … to the Concorde and its intercontinental, Mach 2.2 speeds, to the French rocket, the Ariane-5 and its contemporary power, to Yves Klein’s “Saut dans le vide” [“Leap into the Void”] in 1960 to “L’Envol ou le rêve de voler,” [“Flight or

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the dream of flying”] the final exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris in October 2018, we are reminded of the realization of this great French interpretation of dreams.20 Most recently this dream was embodied in Franky Zapata’s spectacular “FlyBoard” performance when he soared above the Champs Elysées as President Macron and many others looked on during the celebration of Bastille Day, July 14, 2019.21 In this way Buren simply reminds us to wake up and remind ourselves to remember this aerial aspiration. This curious, cinematic mélange of examples of French patrimony is conceptually and contingently framed within the much-maligned context of Buren’s columns. Existing as an incomplete set of fragments from a Cartesian grid, they quietly bespeak the revolution that commenced within the walls of the palace—a space which was used in modern times as a parking lot for functionaires until Buren’s installation. This notion of fragment has been a part of French patrimony at least since the early nineteenth century when, in the aftermath of the French revolution and its devastation, specialists such as Alexandre LeNotre began to preserve, restore, and interpret cultural heritage for the patrimony of the future. A classic example of this shifting semiotic of “ruins” is found in the remains of the monumental Abbey at Cluny as pointed out by art historian, Janet T. Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. The restoration of Notre Dame de Paris after the fire of April 15, 2019 offers a similar challenge. Buren’s art historical storming of the Bastille has magically transformed the courtyard into a mental and physical playground for all ages and all humanity—a playful roaming of a very serious nature as theorized by Pierra Nora and others. What do the images of Carnac and the Concorde have to do with the Deux Plateaux? There is no authorized call here for an heroic revolt as in the Rude monument, nor is there the discreet presentation of a pristine totality as in the LeWitt. Rather Buren has invited us to rethink and to reclaim French and indeed human heritage through a reconsideration of the possibilities of history in place of the passive acceptance of “received ideas.” In Lelong’s words, Buren provides the opportunity for the “spectator to conduct a genuine investigation of the processes.”22 But, in this case, I would add that this investigation includes historical as well as the mathematical processes. The fundamental reconstruction of the historical “language and spoken word,” a revolutionary act in and of itself, reforms the conception of revolution. Finally, in this site, Buren champions the knowledge of the collective national memory as an instrument of Liberté, Fraternité, et Egalité and as a safeguard against tyranny in all forms including epistemological as well as political ones.23 Clearly Buren knows how such structures, including his own, are quickly transformed, appropriated, and legitimized by the narratives of the ruling class in its various guises. It is this informed, and continually reconstructed, memory of Le Patrimoine that permits a global citizen to function fully in a world democracy. Buren’s sculptural synecdoche splinters absolutist conceptions, and modestly traces in sculptural outlines some guiding, minimalist structures for such evocations. It

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is precisely this incompleteness that allows each individual to activate collective reconstructions and buried histories. In so doing, Buren redefines the idea of mass culture in contrast to the prevailing ideology that marginalizes mass culture by identifying it as either kitsch or academic esoterica. This New Classicism reveals the master narrative of absolutism and realigns the new order of May 1968 with the ideals of July 1789 and the hopes of 2019 and beyond. If the “center cannot hold,” the on-going problem, of course, is how to establish so many voices as a New Classicism without their becoming homogenized or monolithic or simply an elitist set of possibilities and interpretations about a few inconvenient columns in an old parking lot. For Buren, history can offer this means of freedom; for others these histories remain a nuisance and a threat. To determine the conditions of history is to empower existence—a new kind of narrative, a new patrimony and matrimony, a new ideal, and a new classicism of a new order that was created just when another new story of freedom was unfolding along a long and winding wall through Berlin. Now, again, this opportunity to remember offers us new challenges to our new millennium with its old monotheisms. A man with a bad memory has nothing to rely on, everything plays him false. Eugène Delacroix, Journal, 25 January 1824 Shaw Smith, Joel O. Conarroe Professor of Art, Davidson College*

Notes 1

2

It will be interesting to see how President Emmanuel Macron deals with the site which has blended into the Parisian landscape and is perhaps simply old news from an older generation to him. See “France’s Macron tells teenager “all me ‘monsieur,’” The Brownsville Herald, June 17, 2018, but this article hardly suggests a “democratic approach” even given Macron’s campaign promises of Globalism. The teenager had addressed the President by his nickname, “Manu.” Nevertheless, the site will continue to need respectful maintenance and protection. John Lichfield, “Les Deux Plateaux: Monument to the French malaise?,”The Independent, January 6, 2008; Caroline Kinneberg, “Daniel Buren on Self Destruction,”Artinfo, January 18, 2008. In the fall of 2008 the French government, after lengthy delays, decided to renovate the Deux Plateaux. I would like to thank my Parisian friend and colleague at EHESS, François Pouillon, for this updated information. “Restauration des colonnes de Buren: C’est parti!,” batiactu, 19 septembre 2008. This restoration, carried through despite Buren’s doubts, was completed and the site reopened by the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, in May 2010. Other important references specifically related to the Deux Plateaux are found in Dore Ashton, “Paris Publicized and Privatized: Daniel Buren in the Palais Royal,” Arts, volume 61, September 1986, pp. 18–20; Michel Nuridsany, Daniel Buren au Palais-Royal: “Les Deux Plateaux,” 1993; and more recently Guy Lelong, Daniel Buren, Flammarion, 2001 (French Edition) and 2002 (English Edition). Alisa Luxemburg kindly told me that there was an article in L’Expresse (c.1990–1) entitled “Le Grand Magicien: Mitterrand,” which noted the connections between freemasonry and the art commissions of Mitterrand (such as

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the Arc de Triomphe at La Défense, the Opéra at the Bastille, and the Deux Plateaux at the Palais Royal). Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to locate this article. The procès of Buren versus Chirac invoked the “droit moral” which had been established earlier in a similar case involving Jean Dubuffet. Garry Apgar, “Report from Paris: The Colonisation of the Palais Royal,” Art in America (July, 1986): 31–5. Ironically, Buren’s work is also a part of the collection on display at the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas (which opened for the 2009 season) along with a number of other important contemporary artists. In addition to several visits to the Palais Royal, in daytime and nighttime, and before and after the installation of the Deux Plateaux, I had the opportunity to speak with Daniel Buren about his work in 1988 at his exhibition, “Metamorphosis: Works in Situ,” Knight Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina USA, 1988. In addition to the celebration of the career and contributions of Jere Surber, I would also like to dedicate this work to the memory of David Craven (University of New Mexico) for his immense help in shaping this manuscript and to Nicole Keroack, my student assistant at Davidson College in the summer of 2008 for her untiring assistance, and to Maya Tetali for her work during the unprecedented, challenging summer of 2020. 3 Guy Lelong, Daniel Buren (Paris: Flammarion, 2002 in French and English), pp. 98–110. 4 “Colonnes de Buren,” Travel France Online, last modified January 12, 2018, https://www.travelfranceonline.com/. 5 Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century (New York: Vendome Press, 1991), p. 269. 6 The inclusive nature of this process is similar to Saussure’s concept of an “infinite chain of signifieds.” 7 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 8 Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 9 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, English edition). I thank Janet Marquardt for reminding me of this important source. 10 As famously declared by Voltaire, “Le doute n’est pas un état agréable, mais l’assurance est un état ridicule.” [“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certitude is an absurd one.]” The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 12, Part 1. 11 Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century, p. 229. 12 Edward Ball, “‘The Beautiful Language of My Century’: From the Situationists to the Simulationists,” in Arts Magazine, January 1989, p. 68. 13 Ibid. “Le pouvoir est dans la rue.” 14 Ibid. “… a new hub in Paris where people meet to experience the frisson of loitering amid imperial architecture above, and a post-modern microlandscape below.” 15 Edward Ball, “‘The Beautiful Language of My Century’”, p. 68. 16 In this same sense, Buren’s Deux Plateux has conceptual and even physical affinities with Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks in Kassel from 1982–1987 and with the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin created by Peter Eisenman in 2005. I would like to thank Michael Maggen, Head of Paper Conservation at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, for this last reference. 17 Journal, May 26, 1855. This night, during the festive period of the Universal Exhibition of 1855, Delacroix had returned from a soirée at the home of Napoléon III. There, he complained he had eaten some “detestable ices” served by the Prince. Ironically, he then mentions for some reason his own kind of two levels, “I had the

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enjoyment of that solemn moment when nature gets back her strength, and royalists and republicans all lie wrapped in the same slumber.” See Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History, 2010 for a lively discussion of the multiple levels of commerce of the Palais Royal and Victoria Elizabeth Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). I thank my former student, Jordan Cole, for her interesting discussion of prostitution and the Palais Royal, “gold and pleasure,” (to invoke Balzac) during our seminar there in April 2010. It has also been suggested that the location of Deux Plateaux in the Court of Honor in the palace had been used as an electric power station in the 1890s with a series of vertical units there as well. 18 He suggested this in a paper on “Abstract Expressionism and Vulgarity,” given at the International Congress of the History of Art, Berlin, July, 1992. 19 Lelong, Daniel Buren, p. 110. 20 W. DeFonvielle, La histoire de la navigation aérienne, p. 271 (Paris: Libraire Hachette et Cie., 1907). France, incidentally, was the third country to achieve flights in space. 21 “French inventor soars above Champs-Élysées on flyboard at Paris parade,” France 24, accessed July 30, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20190714-french-inventorsoars-above-champs-elysees-flyboard-paris-parade. 22 Lelong, Daniel Buren, p. 98. 23 The bicentennial celebration was held in 1989. Here again see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” pp. 7–25, “Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it […] History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism” (pp. 8–9). *

NOT FOR USE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR.

Chapter 11 H UM O R A S A P H I L O S O P H IC A L - R E L IG IO U S B O U N DA RY I N S O R E N K I E R K E G A A R D’ S C ON C LU DI N G U N S C I E N T I F I C P O ST S C R I P T , E M B O D I E D B Y T H E H O SP I TA L C HA P L A I N A S A W I SE F O O L Robert Manzinger

“If life be a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel, it is a victory to those who believe.”1 P. T. Forsyth

Hegel and Kierkegaard: The Boundary between Philosophy and Religion Human life has boundaries, some of our own making, others over which we have no control. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden is one of the boundaries of our habitations, and the ill effects that are generated when these boundaries are transgressed. Conversely, some cultural boundaries need to be transgressed, as Jesus demonstrates by breaking the Jewish law in favor of divine justice. The boundary line between religion and philosophy is essentially the principal difference and battle line between Soren Kierkegaard and Georg Hegel. For Kierkegaard, it is the most significant boundary line in life, and especially in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as one must transgress it in order to become a real Christian and possess an authentic self. This latter boundary line in Kierkegaard’s Postscript, and how the humor of the wise fool helps to approach and possibly transgress it, is the subject at hand. This essay is embedded in a book dedicated to a Hegel scholar, but its inclusion signifies that Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel is not the typical misunderstanding that labels Kierkegaard as being anti-Hegelian. I am not a Hegel scholar, but have been spending more time reading Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard scholars in my later years, and I find it interesting that some of those who have studied Kierkegaard and his relationship with Hegel more closely argue that they are anything but opposites. Gregor Malantschuk argues that Kierkegaard’s quarrel with Hegel is found in his early journals, principally, the abstract and unreal character of Hegel’s speculative philosophy; and second, the fusion of philosophy

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and theology, because for SK, Christianity is distinct from philosophy, and lies on a higher plane.2 This boundary critique between philosophy and Christianity can be found in his journals as early as 1835, even if Hegel is not mentioned directly.3 If this critique is true, then it is Kierkegaard’s boundary line to the beyond (the Jenseits to which Hegel was so allergic) that is the most essential horizon to the religious life as eternal, as happiness lies in eternity.4 Before we discuss this boundary line between philosophy and religion, this primary point of departure between the two, first we must acknowledge Kierkegaard’s debt to Hegel. Jon Stewart (the Kierkegaard scholar, not the TV comedy host) in two recent works5 divides Kierkegaard’s intellectual career and authorship into four time periods. The first period (1834–40) is from his earliest journal entries before he began serious work on the Concept of Irony. His writings in this period refer to some Hegelian ideas but no references to specific passages or texts. Second is the period from 1841 (The Concept of Irony) through 1843 (Either/Or). This is the only period where Soren exercises a careful study of some of Hegel’s texts, but only selections to follow his own agenda. His was an ad hoc use of Hegel from chapters of interest deployed to develop his own thought, as he never did an exhaustive study of any of Hegel’s texts. The third period, from 1844 through the end of his “first authorship” with the Postscript, shows an ongoing interest in Hegel (though not of his primary texts) through his polemics against Danish Hegelians; seen as such, the Postscript as a polemic contra Hegel, the standard view, is a misunderstanding. In the Postscript in particular, the chief targets are Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and foremost is S. K.’s bishop, Hans Lassen Martensen, not Hegel.6 In his final period from 1847 to his death in 1855, Hegel is rarely mentioned, and no new texts of his are discussed, with only a few references to him in his Journals. Hegel remained a source of inspiration for Kierkegaard, and his influence on Soren is “quite positive,”7 as he didn’t merely repeat Hegel but “appropriated Hegel’s ideas for his own purposes by changing them slightly and placing them in new contexts.”8 Thus, when we discuss the concepts of the comic and humor in Kierkegaard’s Postscript in the following section, we are reminded not of an anti-Hegelian stance, but of points of contact between the two. Hegel scholar William Desmond reminds us that while Hegel was no mystic, and for Hegel unlike Kierkegaard, philosophy must not be edifying, nonetheless art, religion and philosophy (in ascending order of importance) are the three modes of Hegel’s highest concept of “absolute spirit.”9 Further, Desmond instructs us that Hegel’s aesthetics end with the comic as the final stage and illustrates this showing how Hegel cites Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and others in order to use comedy as a means of having philosophy laugh at itself.10 It is here at the end of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, where comedy has the last word; it is here where Hegel envisions his much discussed “end of art,” where art in modern aesthetics no longer has the need for inner meaning.11 The dissolution of the comedic and the “end of art” will occur for Hegel in modernity because art is no longer devoted to religion as it was with the ancient Greeks or to that which supplies meaning in life.12 Like Kierkegaard, Hegel notes that the comic has to do with the subjective side of life, the “character’s inner life and private personalities,”13 and with the

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contradictions that arise in everyday living. However, the comic is not merely the laughable, as Hegel views Moliere’s farces, where the characters, and their will and aims, lack substance;14 this does not enable them to take grief into account, as Hegel understands, like S. K., that life often leads to despair. In Hegel’s view, the contradictions and contrasts of the comic “require a solution,” to which S. K. would agree.15 However, for Hegel, the resolution is to “bring the absolutely rational into appearance,”16 a conclusion which Kierkegaard would find to be comic, and in need of the humorous. It is here at the boundary situations in life that we find meaning, and where philosophy resides with its others in absolute spirit, art, and religion.17 Jere Surber, another Hegel scholar in his What Is Philosophy?, further develops Desmond’s “Philosophy and Its Others” with a triad of science, art, and religion; he draws cultural intersections between the three, connecting religion with “the transformation” of signification, science with “the suppression of embodiment,” and art with “the sublimation of Ideality.” Surber maintains the Kierkegaardian separation of philosophy and religion, but while Kierkegaard sees faith as being beyond the boundary of reason, Surber holds that philosophy is accountable to reason alone, describing religion as one of “philosophy’s others.” For Surber, philosophy rests within its rational boundaries, and while it borders on other discourses such as art, science, and religion, philosophy’s others are neither superior or inferior, but merely contiguous discourses. Surber’s rational and cultural analysis brings us to the boundary line of reason in Kierkegaard’s Postscript, to the top of Hegel’s ladder of absolute spirit. Hegel scholars have long used the ladder as a metaphor to describe Hegel’s ascent to Absolute Spirit,18 and it is no coincidence that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author of the Postscript, Johannes Climacus, is named after St. John of the Ladder, a sixth-century monk of the Sinai desert. Kierkegaard chides Danish Hegelians that choices about the priority of their religion and faith need to be made at the ladder’s summit. Climacus, who claims not to be a Christian, observes the boundary lines of discourse in Kierkegaard’s three categories: the aesthetic, ethical, and the religious. He sees the presence of irony, so vital for Hegel as it was for Kierkegaard, as being on the boundary line between the aesthetic and the ethical. But it is the presence of the comic, and more specifically humor, that occupies the final boundary line between Kierkegaard’s ethical stage and the religious. Unlike Kierkegaard, the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus remains in the realm of philosophy, rationally observing the final boundary line of existence. But Climacus is also aware that this boundary line, while erected by reason, is transgressed by humor and transformed by faith. It is to this use of the comic and humor to which we now turn.

The Humor of Johannes Climacus in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author of the Postscript is Johannes Climacus, or St. John of the ladder. The ladder describes the movement through the phases of existence, or stages along life’s way; the aesthetic, ethical, and religious.19 One

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does not graduate from one sphere to the other, as the spheres overlap, but the immediacy of the aesthetic sphere gives way to the responsibility of the ethical stage, leading up to the commitment of faith in the religious sphere, to which the Postscript points. In a footnote in the Postscript, Climacus ascends the ladder and outlines with more specificity the stages and transitions in the movement toward the religious, and they are: immediacy, immediacy with reflection, aesthetic existence, irony, ethical existence, comic perception, suffering and guilt, immanent forms of religious consciousness (religiousness A) and Christianity (religiousness B).20 Irony is the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical stage, and humor is the transition from the ethical to the religious stage. Climacus claims to be a humorist, not a Christian (CUP, 451, 466, 483, 501). He functions on the boundary line between reason and faith, humor and religiousness consciousness, and the historical and the eternal.21 He regards rationality favorably but lacks passion and has not made a commitment of faith. He sees the ethical demand, and human failings in terms of guilt (sin), yet only speculates about the Christian religious position, choosing knowledge over getting (absolutely) involved in existence.22 He understands that humor is the last stage of inwardness before faith, and as pointing toward Christianity.23 Moreover, Climacus in the Postscript, the culmination of this “first authorship,” sums up Soren Kierkegaard’s whole pseudonymous authorship which “must be characterized being within the sphere of humor.”24 In the philosophy of the Postscript, humor is affirmed as the highest view of life attainable by reason. A discussion of Climacus’s theory of humor must first begin with the broader category of the comic, of which irony and humor are a part.25 Kierkegaard’s definitions on humor and the comic change over time,26 and with the sphere to which they are related. The category of the comic is essentially contradiction or incongruity, a juxtaposition of opposites.27 The comic is the contradiction between the eternal and the finite, of ascribing absolute importance to relative ends; and “the contrast between the inward and the outward creates the comic.”28 Lee Barrett highlights four criteria of Kierkegaard’s comic29: the contradictions between something momentous and something trivial (i.e., in the Postscript, Soren’s seemingly endless discussions of outings for amusement to Deer Park vs. our inner passion to be nothing before God and devote ourselves to faith in the Infinite)30; second the polemical, poised toward the deficiencies of the finite31; third, the tragic and comic are the same, as they are both based on contradiction; but the “tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comic the painless contradiction,”32 and implicit danger that the protagonist in a comic situation may awaken and begin to suffer— therefore possibility of suffering may be avoidable, as there is a way out of the situation (CUP, 462).33 Those who base their religious faith on speculative thought are comical (CUP, 54ff). The comic is one of the major devices that opens the path to inwardness and “sensitizes someone to the stirrings of the infinite.”34 The other related concept to humor that falls under the broad category of the comic is irony, which, of course, refers back to Socrates and Kierkegaard’s doctoral dissertation: The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates. Yet, as Oden remarks: “Socrates is the master of irony but not necessarily of humor.”35 It is

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irony that unveils the hidden contradictions of aesthetic and ethical existence, as it exists along their boundary line as “infinite negativity.”36 The ironist is governed more by intellect and is less sympathetic than the humorist; the ironist laughs at the contradictions in our external existence, while the humorist laughs at the internal contradictions that he or she shares with all individuals.37 The humorist, occupying the boundary line of the ethical and the religious, is concerned with the issues of sin, guilt, and suffering whereas the Ironist stops short of this, focusing on finitude. The humorist brings forward the deeper contradiction between our devotion to the God-idea and everything else that is merely finite.38 As we will soon see, suffering is the most significant identifier of Christianity for Kierkegaard, so humor is more profoundly skeptical than irony, because it focuses on sinfulness, not finitude.39 The humorist sees the ethical demand and human failing in terms of guilt and sin, yet only speculates about the Christian’s religious position. Thus, the subsequent difference between the humorist and the religious person is that the humorist lacks the religious passion and inward conviction of the God relationship. Now we are ready to focus more specifically on Kierkegaardian humor per se: humor as an intellectual understanding of the Christian truth and the last stage of existential inwardness before faith.40 Kierkegaard regards humor in the Postscript as being on the boundary line of the ethical and the religious. One issue is that later in the Postscript, he differentiates between Religiousness A (immanental religion, a universal religiosity for the divine, as exemplified in the person of the godly pagan Socrates) and Religiousness  B, which is Christianity. The difficulty is that Kierkegaard is not always clear whether there is a transition period of humor before both Religiousness A and Religiousness B, or the other alternative is that Kierkegaard used humor in a limited sense as a precursor to Religiousness A, but in a wider sense Religiousness  A is a part of humor, and thus humor is a transition zone before Christianity, or Religiousness B.41 I am inclined to the latter alternative.42 Humor, like irony, is grounded in recollection: the ability to intellectually grasp the eternal. But it is through religious passion that the humor of Religiousness A couples with faith in order to make the movement to Religiousness B. Humor is a jumping-off point for religious striving for the one who understands this intellectually, but lacks the passion to make the religious commitment. Johannes Climacus views humor as the last stage of inwardness before faith; the humorist can point toward Christianity, but is unwilling to take the movement of faith. The focal point on humor for Climacus is that humor appears as an incognito, or outward mask or disguise, for the religious.43 Monks and nuns can show the outside world their religiosity by living in a religious community; nineteenth-century Danish citizens could live a comfortable worldly life, but strive to prove to the external world that they were Christians merely by being members of the Danish state church. One can wear many masks for the world to see on the outside to give the appearance of religiosity but Kierkegaard was mainly concerned with the inwardness of faith. What sort of external markers could the person of Religiousness B use to demonstrate to the world that they are possessed by the inwardness of faith? In a later book, Works of

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Love, Kierkegaard argues that the inwardness of faith is driven outward in works of love, as Christ is the prototype of this new type of living, and Christians are not just to preach their faith, but demonstrate it through their actions. Merold Westphal convincingly calls this Religiousness C,44 yet this is a later addition that goes beyond the experience of the humorist Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, who is not a Christian. The humorist is a thinker, not a believer.45 We cannot talk about God in a literal fashion, so one is forced to talk metaphorically about the divine. One also cannot speak about inwardness of the religious stage, or how to live one’s life directly, that is, as an object of knowledge, but indirectly, in what Kierkegaard called indirect communication. Instead of expressing his relationship with God, Kierkegaard shows how people try to find happiness in something finite and other than God. Humor becomes a vehicle to illustrate how Kierkegaard is no different or less guilty than others intending to find happiness in something less than God.46 One needs a sense of humor in order to ensure that the morally virtuous person remains humble, patient, and persevering.47 Kierkegaard uses the birds of the air and the lilies of the field to humorously illustrate what birds and lilies have to teach humans about God.48 Indirect communication is the vehicle through which Kierkegaard was able to portray his stages of life in his pseudonymous, first authorship books, to talk about God and the religious stage indirectly. The Postscript is the last of these books, and as such is a transitional work of its own, as after it, he begins to write his “religious works” for fellow believers in the final decade of his life. But the Postscript is written to illustrate the existential choices about God and about life, written by one who as yet has not made a decision for religion. The religious person is able to pick up this discourse, as one who believes, and speak from the position of inwardness, using the outer veil or mask of humor. Through the use of humor, the religious person is able to point to God using a religious incognito. As an incognito, humor is a boundary line for religious persons as it protects their inwardness;49 as a humorous exterior, it prevents the person’s interior life from becoming worldly (CUP 454). Humor is used as a mask to reframe things, the way a chaplain often has to reframe the sufferings of patients in the hospital to enable them to see things differently. Humor also functions as indirect communication, to be able to discuss meaningful choices and modes of living in life, without trying to discuss God as if the divine were an object of knowledge, as in speculative philosophy, rather than a God-relationship to be entered, as in existential discourse. Moreover, one’s inwardness could not be discussed in any way except indirectly anyway. The religious person speaks personally, while philosophers become foolish when they forget existential discourse, thinking knowledge is merely objective. This was made abundantly clear when a friend of mine observed the film library of a contemporary well-nigh Climacus, a philosophy professor and Hegel scholar, and noticed that it was filled with dramas and historical documentaries, but lacked a single comedy. However, “if life be a comedy to those who think,” then the final philosophical discourse before the religious is humor, even when discussing the sufferings of life.

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Remembering our previous discussion, the comic is a contradiction between incongruous opposites, like the external world and the inward world; however, the comic consciousness is painless, and the tragic consciousness is painful. Suffering is the essential feature of religious consciousness, but comedy is the reverse side of suffering. Whereas the comic is a painless contradiction (CUP 514), humor is always concealed pain (CUP, 532n). The humorist moves beyond the mere comic in comprehending moral evil and the sufferings of life; Humor is the reverse side of suffering, as it views pain in relation to eternity.50 Humor is able to view suffering and pain, not as ends in themselves, that is idolatrously, but in relation to eternity and eternal happiness. Humor does not delight in the sufferings of others but is empathic; humor is situated to serve as a means to communicate one’s inwardness. Humor sees the incommensurability of the finite and the infinite, but, does not dwell in despair with the tragic; rather it deals with pain by revoking “the essential meaning of suffering for the existing person.”51 As the later Kierkegaard views suffering as the essential mark of a Christian, he does not end there. Since in relation to God, “we are always in the wrong,” Kierkegaard views suffering through the lens of being able to praise God, even in the midst of our sufferings. For it is this that enables us to endure and rise above our sufferings, and move forward in order to respond with hope.

The Chaplain as the Wise Fool in Kierkegaard’s Postscript As a hospital chaplain, working as a member of a Spiritual Care Department in a secular setting, I live out Kierkegaardian boundary concerns on a daily basis, on occasion between philosophy and religion, but usually of spirituality (which entails some philosophy) and religion. “Spiritual Care” is a deliberate choice of words, superseding the traditional term of Pastoral Care which implies a distinctly Christian theological presence. On the one hand, religious discourse is expected of us as chaplains; on the other, many patients or staff do not desire to hear it. Countless encounters occur with patients who carry the label of “no religious preference” on their hospital charts. Yet, “no religious preference” may often mean an interest in spirituality, either in spite of indifference to religion or lingering wounds from previous churches.52 While there remains a suspicion of religious practices across the culture and despite the United States’ advanced secularization, spirituality is still valued in my hospital setting—and that involves a search for value and meaning. The sine qua non of my own definition of spirituality is transcendence, and like Kierkegaard, I consider myself as “becoming a Christian.” However, I realize that one of my privileges as a chaplain is to enter that boundary area where humor resides beyond Kierkegaard’s ethical stage with patients and patient families. The chaplain, like the circus clown, is one entering into the boundary situations of life with the patient. Heije Faber writes: He has a kind of solidarity with the public in the boundary situations of existence sorrow, the absurd, setbacks … His solidarity with the patient is peculiarly his

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own, different from that of the doctor; it springs from a familiarity with the boundary situation … In this solidarity the minister like the clown will seek to make himself small but in so doing he will point towards the great things, which can set the sick man free, show him the (divine) humor of the situation, so that in the midst of suffering he will raise a smile.53

My work as a chaplain in the trauma bay, end-of-life care, crisis situations, and even routine rounding visits places me in a unique position of being able to use humor appropriately to guide folks into discussions of meaning and value, and let them reflect on their own choices. This brings me to what I regard as a Kierkegaardian image for spiritual care: the wise fool. For Kierkegaard, folly as heavenly wisdom lived out as earthly foolishness is at the heart of the Christian message. Christianity is built upon the Incarnation and the God-man, one of many paradoxes in the Christian religion. St. Paul says that we must become fools for Christ’s sake,54 for the cross, the primary symbol of Christianity, is foolishness, for what sane human serves a God who died for them, instead of the other way around.55 A paradoxical God involves laughter while a God wholly subsumed under reason is a God who makes sense, which a fool may strategically undercut. The fool historically is one who counterbalances the arrogance of authority, questions the limits of order, denounces self-interest, and champions lost causes. Kierkegaard, in his early journals, notes that, in the Middle Ages, a fool’s relationship to his master established the split between the nobility and the poorer classes, so the fool stands as a prophetic challenge to authority.56 Humor also unveils the folly of being compromised by the world in the life of the spiritual person. It is important to note that for the “wise fool,” it is wisdom that stands in back of the practice of folly. The use of humor in chaplaincy must be used appropriately and requires professional training and practice, in order to use words with a creative spontaneity to draw people closer, not create distance.57 One must determine whether something is wise or merely nonsense. Thus, the chaplain must not be a clown or merely foolish, but a wise fool. There are numerous images of spiritual care, from Henri Nouwen’s Wounded Healer,58 to the classical image of the shepherd,59 but the one that stands out in relation to the boundary line of humor is that of the wise fool.60 Alastair V. Campbell, British theologian and bioethicist, cites Kierkegaard, who notes that the idea of Christ as the greatest hero is laughable and the absurd in that the central paradox for Christianity is that “the eternal is the historical.”61 How does one point to the paradox of an eternal God made human without laughter, as reason merely sees what is finite as an end in itself? In the hospital setting, a chaplain is “in the world but not of the world,” the professional who arrives to address the spiritual, not merely heal the physical. The wise fool appears to be out of place, so they must exercise creativity and sensitivity to address the foolishness of faith as one who is wise enough to discern the spiritual within the physical. Campbell describes the three touchpoints of the wise fool as simplicity, loyalty, and prophecy. First, the wise fool has a natural simplicity, like that of the “natural

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fool” in Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, as folly reveals the unexpected or overlooked. Erasmus even views Jesus as “something of a fool” when he assumed human form.62 Finally, Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, who is the Christ figure in The Idiot, is a sincere, simple-minded person, who exposes the insincerity and corruption of those around him. The second touchpoint, folly as loyalty, exhibits the folly of the cross, the lack of self-interest, the “foolhardy” path of loyalty to Christ. The foolishness of loyalty is that folks will lay down their lives for others, putting love and service first. To forgive others appears to be foolish according to earthly standards, yet it embraces a heavenly wisdom. Third, the wise fool demonstrates that folly is prophecy; it is not foretelling, or futuristic prediction, but forth telling, or “telling it like it is,” one of the catchphrases of the 1960’s. The prophets from the Hebrew Scriptures displayed bizarre behavior in their embodied symbolic actions to bring forth God’s messages: Hosea marries a prostitute, Isaiah wanders around the city naked and barefoot; Jeremiah walks around with a yoke on his back, Ezekiel cuts off his hair, burns it, and scatters it to the wind.63 Even Jesus displays prophetic foolishness by reversing the religious values of his day by defying religious legalism; preaching an upside-down Kingdom, finding the poor more acceptable than the powerful by associating with the “wrong company”; and then dying a criminal’s death in a kingly robe with his disciples, later proclaiming the foolishness that he was raised from the dead. The traditional chaplaincy model of the shepherd has its methods and techniques for guidance, while the wounded healer model exhibits an empathic “ministry of presence” for those in pain or suffering; but it is the wise fool model that is best suited to reframing a patient’s problems by suggesting a different perspective.64 The biblical story of Naaman illustrates how the prophet instructs the foreign general that his healing of leprosy could be found in the Jordan River; however, Naaman expected to pay a king’s ransom for his cure, or at least be given a more dignified remedy more in line with his social stature. Yet his servant reframed the situation by saying that if the general could do difficult things, surely he could trust the prophet enough to do this simple thing, to wash himself in the dirty Jordan River.65 Whereas the secular professional does a psychological assessment, the chaplain does a spiritual assessment and moral evaluation. What appears to be psychologically complex may be morally simple. The wise fool has the Ockham’s razor capacity to see medical situations as simpler than others think; the wise fool is the counterbalance to unveil hope for patients who believe the worst about their situation, and model faith for the faithless who would like to be able to believe the best. Even in hopeless situations, the wise fool is able to help patients not take it so seriously, and find their meaning in the time that remains. If God sits in the heavens and laughs,66 God can speak through a fool that bears divine wisdom. For Kierkegaard, humor is the highest achievement of a reasonable person before they enter the realm of religion and faith. The realms of philosophy and religion have their boundary lines to be sure, but if Kierkegaard is right, then only in humor and laughter can these boundary lines be approached and understood. Forsyth’s quote at the beginning of this essay states that life is a comedy to the

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thinking person, and a victory to the person of faith; the wise fool claims to have a foot in each camp, in philosophy and religion. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”67

Notes P.T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, 1909), p. 338. 2 Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 59. 3 In one of his earliest journals, AA, from 1835, Kierkegaard writes in Italics, “Philosophy and Christianity can never be united,” for one must practice a “living oneself-into-it (Christianity),” not an entry through speculative philosophy, as one must first acknowledge one’s sin and need for redemption. Soren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Notebooks and Journals: Volume I: Journals AA-DD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 25, 29. 4 Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press), p. 151. 5 Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 448–523; and Jon Stewart, “Hegel: Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts,” in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome I: Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 97–165. 6 Jon Stewart argues that the principal targets of the Kierkegaardian polemic in the Postscript were two Danish Hegelians, primarily Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen, and to a lesser degree, Johan Ludwig Heiberg, and code words were used to satirize them. Kierkegaard’s journals indicate that a polemic against Martensen would be too direct, a scruple that he gave up the following year when he outed the editors of the Corsair, forsaking their pseudonyms. Even though Martensen’s name is deliberately not in the Postscript, it is in the drafts with other Hegelians found in Kierkegaard’s journals. Martensen is satirized in the Postscript with phrases such as system, Privatdocent, the Cartesian “de omnibus dubitandum est.,” and “sub specie aeternitatis” (under the view of eternity). See Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, 451–66. 7 Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts,” 98. 8 Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts,” 140. 9 William Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 3. 10 Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic, 295. Desmond himself sees the need for the comic in order to critique the totality of reason and make room for God; see also Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 45. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1236. 12 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 13 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1205. 14 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1199–1200, 1234. 15 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1201. 16 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1202. 17 William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). 1

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18 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), p. 14. See especially Henry S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, 2 volumes (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1997). 19 Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 213–15. 20 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. I ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong with introduction and notes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 531–2n. From this point forward, all references in parentheses refer to Kierkegaard’s Postscript in the Hong’s translation. 21 Soren Kierkegaard, The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology, ed. and intro. Thomas C. Oden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 28. 22 Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 302. 23 Julia Watkin, The A to Z of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2010), p. 126. 24 Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 213. 25 Soren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 465. 26 In a few of his early journals from 1837, Kierkegaard influenced by Hamann, “the greatest and most authentic humorist,” regards humor as intrinsic to Christianity; but in his latter writings, humor was not a necessary feature of Christianity, but was useful in realizing it. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. I Journals, AA-DD, 225–37; see also Lydia B. Amir, Humor and the Good Life: Shaftesbury, Hamann, Kierkegaard (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), p. 166. 27 Of course, for Kierkegaard, Christianity is filled with these incongruities: the eternal and temporal, the God-man of the Incarnation, God born into time to save humanity, the Absolute Paradox, the foolishness of the cross, and a kingdom of God built on suffering and love. 28 Lydia Amir lists ten points about the role of the comic in the “deepening of inwardness that leads to Christianity,” for in order to become a self, one must have faith. The second point is listed above in quotes. Amir, Humor and the Good Life, 182–9. 29 Lee Barrett, “The Uses and Misuses of the Comic: Reflections on the Corsair Affair,” in the International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Corsair Affair, vol. 13, ed. Robert Perkins (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1990), pp. 126–8. 30 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 413–17. 31 To perceive the contradiction and refuse to adopt a polemical stance toward the finite, is to “go to the Devil.” Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. II F-K, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 264. 32 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Hannay, 431. 33 Kierkegaard’s own misuse of the comic was to expose the real identities of two authors of the journal, the Corsair bringing needless suffering upon himself in the form of reprisals from these Corsair, authors, who in turn also suffered, being driven from Denmark, while Kierkegaard was forced to ride out into the country, to distance himself from the hecklers that occupied his peripatetic route in Copenhagen. John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, LLC., 2000), p. 124. 34 Barrett, The Corsair Affair, 139. 35 Oden, The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology, 25.

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36 Barrett, The Corsair Affair, 124. 37 Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 271–84. 38 Kierkegaard notes that Religiousness A is a pantheistic superstition that sees God in everything (CUP, trans. Hannay), 423–4. 39 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 329. 40 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 196. 41 Reidar Thomte, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1949), pp. 101–2. 42 This view has its own difficulties in that the ethical can be viewed as fused with, or as a subset of Religiousness A. 43 Westphal, Becoming a Self, 165. 44 Westphal, Becoming a Self, 197–8. 45 Amir, Humor and the Good Life, 172. 46 With apologies to Lutherans, this means that the religious person can regard Luther’s “law” (which Luther never clearly defines) as being in and of itself comical, as it exposes sinful and self-serving behavior by laughing at its foolishness. 47 John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, 174. 48 Kierkegaard wrote on the birds of the air and the lilies of the field in a series of seven discourses on “The Anxieties of the Heathen,” in Christian Discourses, trans. with an intro. and notes Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 1–93. He also wrote, and now in a beautiful new translation, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses, trans. and with an intro. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 49 John Lippitt, “Humor and Irony in the Postscript,” in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide, ed. Rick Anthony Furtak (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 160–1. 50 Watkin, The A to Z of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 126. 51 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Hannay, 379. 52 In one encounter, I met a man and his sister in the trauma bay waiting room, and upon introducing myself as a chaplain, his immediate comment was “I am an atheist.” My rejoinder was, “I have a degree in philosophy, and have read my share of atheists, but I did not come here to discuss religion, I came because I am concerned about your mother.” His sister resumed the conversation, and the man later apologized and opened up about his own life, as did his sister. 53 Heije Faber, Pastoral Care in the Modern Hospital, trans. Hugo de Waal (London: SCM Press, 1971; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 85. 54 Folly has a biblical and theological background of the gospel as folly (a God who dies for God’s people) and the preacher as a wise fool (I Cor 1:18–31;3:18–23). 55 St. Paul is seen as the raving mad fool preaching about worshipping a dead God (Acts 17:16–3; 26:1–32). 56 Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2 F-K, 248–9. 57 Heije Faber, Pastoral Care in the Modern Hospital, 81–92. 58 Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972). 59 Alastair V. Campbell, “The Courageous Shepherd,” in Images of Pastoral Care: Classical Readings, ed. Robert C. Dykstra (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2005).

11. Humor as a Philosophical-Religious Boundary 60 Alastair V. Campbell, “Wise Fool,” in Images of Pastoral Care, 94–107. 61 Alastair V. Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981), p. 56. 62 Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care, 56–9. 63 Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care, 62–6. 64 Donald Capps, “The Wise Fool Reframed,” Images of Pastoral Care, 108–22. 65 II Kings 5: 1–27. 66 Psalm 2:4. 67 I Corinthians 1:25.

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Chapter 12 M A N D E L A’ S L E G A L A N D S P I R I T UA L P O L I T IC S Elias Kifon Bongmba

In this chapter, I employ the terms Mandela legal and spiritual politics to reflect one of Africa’s most remarkable leaders of the twentieth century. I started this conversation at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association at Indianapolis in 2014, when I organized a panel on the work of former South African President Nelson Mandela who died December 5, 2013. I presented a preliminary inquiry at that panel on that was limited to Mandela’s spiritual politics. Recently, I was delighted to find and read Dennis Grywagen’s book, The Spiritual Mandela: Faith and Religion in the Life of Nelson Mandela, an important text that pulls together the many facets of Mandela’s Life, spirituality, and relationship with the Methodist Church, and also documents how faith was essential to him during his long struggle for justice in South Africa.1 Second, the inspiration for this chapter is Jere Surber’s book, Culture, and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies.2 Surber’s analysis of cultural studies in this book addressed contemporary theories of critical studies, including liberal humanism, hermeneutics, and the interpretation of culture which discussed Friedrich Schleiermacher’s grounding of romantic hermeneutics and understanding. Wilhelm Dilthey described hermeneutics as a method for the human sciences. Martin Heidegger approached the question of being as an investigation carried through phenomenological hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his own philosophical hermeneutics, pursued the question of understanding. Surber focused on applied hermeneutics in the social sciences, discussing as an example Clifford Geertz’s anthropological articulation of culture, which opened up new research avenues for scholars to pursue the interpretation of human culture as local expressions of what, for lack of a better expression, one could describe as the pursuit of the will to be and thrive.3 Surber introduced readers to critiques of culture from the materialist, psychoanalytic, the critical Frankfurt School, the formalists, structuralist, and semiotic analysis. Surber next analyzed the poststructuralist and the postmodern turns and concluded with what he described broadly as a cultural analysis that reflected the theoretical positioning of the fin de circle in the British, French, and American cultural studies.

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Third, while I do not discuss the arguments of the book, Surber’s analysis provided an inspiration for me because I locate what I am calling Mandela’s legal and spiritual politics in a broad tradition of critique (philosophical, cultural, political, and theological), a practice which is also grounded in critical appropriation and affirmation. At the cultural level, we see some of this type of critique in the way Mandela lived his life; affirming his Xhosa traditions, spiritual roots in the indigenous religions, yet joined and belonged to the Methodist Church in South Africa, introduced by missionaries. But Mandela also embraced the modern liberal democratic tradition, which white racist and Mandela lived in a context where part of the Christian tradition, specifically, the faith tradition of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, had distorted its vision, and imposed what Alton Templin, Surber’s colleague at the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology, described and analyzed in Ideology on the Frontier.4 Templin’s critique called into question Afrikanner conception of their right to the land in South Africa, and their misuse of Christian teachings to enshrine Afrikanerdom as a philosophical and political project of domination, which denigrated Blacks and attempted to decimate the Black will and courage to be, as Alan Boesak argued in the past.5 The Afrikaner occupation and domination in South Africa from 1652 and their redefinition of the theological concept of election which they reserved for the election of whites as the chosen owners of South Africa inaugurated one of the most notorious racial projects of the modern world. The Afrikaner settlers claimed that they were establishing a Christian civilization, but what they imposed was an imperial culture that disparaged and dominated Blacks for hundreds of years. While the modern articulation of the doctrines emerged and was grounded in the twentieth century, the seeds of the privileging of white settlers over local owners of the land were laid at the very beginning of the arrival of whites in the region. The whites dispossessed Blacks of their land, embarked on practices that would suppress Black religious, cultural, and economic Life and turn Blacks into a life of servitude. Mandela’s legal and spiritual politics rejected Afrikanerdom, its false religiosity, its economics of repression, and its pseudo-Christian modernist full-throated valorization of whites because it was grounded in racism. Mandela’s cultural and spiritual orientation led him to challenge this fallacy and he paid the prize for the politics of justice with a sentence of life imprisonment on the notorious prison on Robben Island. On his release, Mandela led South Africa to establish a democratic society, confirming what he said at his trial: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”6 Mandela combined his legal and spiritual and political vision to lead South Africa to freedom. The legal and spiritual ideals led Mandela to pursue and practice politics that was inspired by his local African cultural and religious roots, the ecclesial roots from Methodism, and the broad humanistic tradition which motivated him to reject fascism and its destructive politics.

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I will pursue the idea of legal dimension of his politics in a very limited sense to refer to Mandela’s commitment to the law that liberates and promotes justice. The spiritual dimension of the chapter refers to the religious and moral upbringing that shaped Mandela’s politics which I am suggesting that one should see it as a large world of legal and spiritual politics. I discuss the legal and spiritual dimension of Mandela’s politics is to demonstrate that one cannot understand the triumphalism of apartheid if it is only grounded in purely transcendental assumptions where the presence of a divine being is the ground and source of spirituality. While that may be the case for many people, it is also the case for some people being spiritual is practicing certain virtues and in the case of Mandela, one should that also recognize that it involves living, struggling, and leading in a way that promotes the dignity of all people. While virtues are qualities which individuals cultivate to live an ethical life, the practice of virtues is also related to other dimensions of life. In the political community, a life of virtue and public spirituality as the case of Mandela demonstrates, can be and is often related to the regulatory instruments of the society such as the constitution, the penal code, or what is generally called in some countries, the laws of the land. While these laws are promulgated by the Parliaments or the respective bodies charged with making laws in different countries, they can be a handmaid to spiritual politics. I do not imply here that people always keep the law because that is a spiritual thing to do. I also do not suggest that the laws of the land always have some intrinsic religious qualities. Yet one would be remiss not to recognize that in the case of South Africa, there was a relationship between the spiritual and the doctrine of apartheid. Apartheid laws were designed to put into effect a theological position that privileged whites over Blacks. If being spiritual in the way I have discussed so far has to do with cultivating intersubjective relations that respect the dignity of others in society, the question is, what does the law have to do with it? In an essay by Jacques Derrida, “The laws of reflection: Nelson Mandela in Admiration,” Derrida argues that Mandela admired the law. Derrida reflected on an inscribed document, in this case, the legal code, the laws of the land. While the law is not religious, it can aid persons who seek to develop a social disposition that may require spiritual resources that might help the individual cultivate social relations that are respectful of persons, polity, and policies that promote the common good. Derrida’s essay is instructive here, not only because he claimed that Mandela commanded admiration even from his enemies through his reflection, but because Mandela had respect for the law. The admiration that Mandela had for the law led him, and many other South African Black leaders to reject the apartheid laws intended to balkanize the country. Derrida argues: “Mandela’s political experience or passion can never be separated from a theoretical reflection: about history, culture, and above all jurisprudence.” Derrida argued that Mandela admires the law, and the law he respects has a universal character because it includes the principles “inaugurated by the Magna Charta, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man (people) under their diverse forms … upon what is human and

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worthy of that name.”7 Mandela respects the “logic of the legacy” to the extent that he can turn it against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Derrida argues that two signs indicate Mandela’s reflection. First, Mandela’s organization, the African National Congress, with a structure similar to the American Congress and the House of Lords, promulgated in 1955 the Charter of Freedom that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inspired. Derrida highlights the vicious violation of Black humanity and denial of their rights by the Dutch who arrived in South Africa, claimed the land as their God-given land, and racialized citizenship by imposing laws to exclude Blacks from their land. Derrida connects Mandela’s respect for the law by pointing out that Mandela had a broad vision of the law that was grounded in and respected the growing internationalism that motivated many nations of the world to reject Nazi laws and policies, choosing to risk a just confrontation that would lead the loss of many lives, to protect international norms that guaranteed the rights of everyone to live and participate fully in the affairs of the state as guaranteed by law and standards which grounded the dignity of all persons. Mandela contested the approach to the problems of South Africa offered by liberals who wanted to change the structure of society through constitutional means because he considered the constitution in South Africa was a violent act that was driven by “the limited sum of private interests, those of the white minority.”8 Mandela rejected this alliance with White liberals because he was convinced that only people who enjoy democratic and constitutional privileges could demand those rights. Derrida argues that the majority of the people in South Africa did not have rights because the white political regime excluded Blacks from political participation by using what Derrida describes as a “violent performative act; an autographic fiction because in South Africa, the entire nation did “not correspond to the delimitation effected by the white minority.”9 The Freedom Charter proclaimed by Mandela and others challenged this act. It speaks in the present, “a present supposed to be founded on the description of a historical fact, which in turn should be recognized in the future … a future which has prescriptive value.”10 South Africa belongs to all its inhabitants, Black and white. No government can claim an authority that is not founded on the will of the entire people. “The people will govern. All the national groups will enjoy equal rights … All will be equal before the law.”11 Derrida points out that while the charter does not annul the law that founded South Africa, it refounds it by “reflecting against the white minority principles from which it was claiming to be inspired, whereas actually it never ceased to betray them.”12 This stand against the constitution of South Africa taken by Mandela and the African National Congress is the first sign of Mandela’s admiration and respect for the law. One should add a deliberate legal politics as I define it in this chapter. The second sign is that Mandela prefers and admires parliamentary democracy in the Anglo-American tradition, which subverts the established regime in South Africa. Derrida argues that what is at issue here is not only the “assignable origin for the history of the law, only a reflecting apparatus … such an apparatus cannot be represented in objective space for at least two reasons …”13 The first reason is

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that the law that Mandela respects has a structure that tends toward universality. “Its meaning requires that in its immediacy, it must extend beyond the historical, national, geographical linguistic, and cultural limits of its phenomenal origin.”14 What white South Africa did was to hide the essence of the principles to which it appeals. It has also privatized, particularized, and appropriated them, “and in that way taking them over against their very reason for being, against reason itself.”15 I think if we can borrow words from Levinas, white South Africa, in appropriating the law, has also “totalized” it for white advantage. The contrast here is that the stand against apartheid represented by the “reflection” of Mandela made visible what has been made invisible by the political phenomenality of the white regime. “Transporting the invisible into the visible, this reflection does not proceed from the visible; rather it passes through understanding … it reveals to understanding … what relates only to reason.”16 The second reason is that Mandela’s reflection makes him see “the very presence of this law in the interior of African society, even before the ‘arrival of the white man.’”17 Derrida spells out three themes that are very revealing. The first theme is that of fascination with the law. “… the alternatives of a long stare, petrified, by something that, without being simply a visible object, looks at you, already concerns you, understands you, and orders you to continue observing, responding, making you responsible for the look that looks at you and beckons you beyond the visible: neither perception nor hallucination.” The second theme is that of the seed of democracy in South Africa. The reflection which points to the principles of democracy in the African society before the arrival of the whites is an indication that there was a democratic seed in South Africa (and one might add African society) that could have developed into fruition. Afrikaner arrogance that imposed legal structures that restricted Blacks in South Africa preempted the exploration of those local possibilities. They did this because they were determined to cease what initially did not belong to them but, more importantly, begin a systematic brutalization of the land and the longtime inhabitants based on exclusionary laws grounded on the principles of racial separation. The third theme Derrida notes here is that of the South African “homeland, the birthplace of the all-national groups called upon to live under the law of the new South African Republic.”18 Derrida’s reference is to what emerged after several segregated acts into what was called the “Bantustan policy.” The South African government launched this policy with the Native Lands Act of 1913, which created reserves. The stated purpose of this legislation was to make clear the situation of Black’s vis-a-sis white areas, “(that they) should only be allowed to enter urban areas which are essentially the white man’s creation when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the white man, and should depart therefore when he ceases to so minister.” White laws were thus an abuse of the idea of the law. When the Nationalist government came to power in 1948, they passed legislation that accomplished two things; first, it further polarized the African communities that had lived in the region for a long time and promoted inhumane racial distinctions. The New Group Acts of 1950 excluded Indians and Africans from

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certain parts of the country and confined them to what amounted to 13 percent of the total landmass of South Africa. Responding to criticism of this policy in 1961, then Prime Minister Dr. Verwoerd had argued that the South African government was facing pressure and his government would create Bantustans, so-called homelands for Blacks in South Africa. The primary purpose was to buy freedom for whites in South Africa. Rather than address the legal questions concerning the status and place of Blacks in the country, the South African government invented a legal strategy that assigned so-called homelands for Blacks as a way of carving out a segregated white South Africa. Mandela and the other Black leaders rejected the Bantustan’s policy, thus rejecting the claims of the European guest who had come to the land and claimed it was “his country.” This was the theft and brutal seizure of land, which the White settlers used a sham legal system to subvert democratic principles for their advantage. But the homeland that Derrida refers to is the homeland that was intact and only fragmented by segregated legislation. Legal machinations were planned to remove Blacks from South Africa but the white population continued to depend on their labor as they would come into South Africa, this time as guest workers. More importantly, it was a plan that began the systematic destruction of Black South Africa. Mandela resisted these moves because there was a democratic institution in South African culture, and the land belonged to all the people. There was no class division, no poor or rich, no exploitation of the Other. All were free and equal. “… In such a society are contained the seeds of a revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude and in which poverty, want, and insecurity shall be no more …”19 Derrida notes that Mandela’s fascination brings to view not only the principles of what is generally called western democracy but also the seeds of a human system that were inherent in the African society. Thus, in declaring admiration for these western ideas, he expresses his respect for what is genuinely African. “The figures of African society … make visible ahead of time, what remains invisible in its historical phenomenon, that is to say, the classless society and the end of exploitation …”20 In the last three sections of his essay, Derrida refers to Mandela as a man of the law. First, he is such by vocation. As a man of the law, when brought before the law and charged for violating the law which neither he nor his people had a part in making, he attributes responsibility for those problems to the government. The government “promulgated that law, knowing that my people, who constitute the majority of the population of this country, were opposed to that law …”21 In such a presentation of himself and his people, Mandela rejects the law of South Africa and presents a movement for justice. Here, we have Derrida’s reading of the transcription of the court proceedings in which Mandela was charged with treason for inciting violence. Speaking in his defense Mandela said that he and his people followed their conscience. Their conscience and a conscience of the law is one and the same thing. Mandela’s presentation of himself and his people is just one history that reflects on what is admirable, namely the law. In this process, Derrida claims that Mandela interiorizes what the Christian West has given it. Its traits are found in philosophy,

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politics, jurisprudence, and morality. These and especially the law reside in intimate conscience, which calls on people to judge intentions and goodwill. Derrida rightly argues: “Before any juridical or political discourse, before the texts of positive law, the law speaks by the voice of conscience or is inscribed in the depths of the heart.”22 My assumption here is that it speaks in the heart of the Other, the Blacks of South Africa who were under apartheid, who as humans were indeed Other than the Dutch settlers, but under the political system being crafted with the laws of segregation, they would be an ultimate Other if apartheid succeeded and they were disposed of their lands to the white establishment and regime. Today one wonders who the new others of today are, maybe immigrants ironically from Sub-Saharan Africa. Mandela, a man of the law by profession, was denied access to personal conversation. He resorted to correspondence. But in doing that, he did not fail to complain about it. Interestingly, Derrida indicates that although the context will be different, “there will always be a politics of the voice and writing, of the difference between what is said ‘aloud’ and what is written, between the ‘live voice’ and correspondence.”23 Mandela says that violence has been the response when they have dared to speak. For that reason, Africans are turning to the only language that the white government understands: the language of violence. However, Mandela did not resort to violence without trying other options. He wrote to the government requesting that a consultation be held. The government did not acknowledge receipt of his letter, let alone answer it. The government’s failure to respond was not only uncivilized behavior; it was an abdication of its responsibility. Mandela pointed out that the African National Congress was forced to act according to its conscience and the people’s conscience. Commenting on the action of the government, Mandela stated that by working in a way that brought contempt to the laws, the government used the law to “handicap me in my personal life, in my career, and my political work, in a way which is calculated in my opinion, to bring about the contempt of the law.”24 Thus, in scorning the law, Derrida argues that Mandela performs “the symmetrical inverse of the respect for the moral law, as Kant would say: Achtung/ Verachtung is not then his, is not Mandela’s.”25 In other words, Mandela respected the law and kept the law by scorning an illegal law that was not meant to protect and defend freedom for all people in South Africa but protect white settlers at the expense of indigenous Blacks who had lived there for a long time before the whites came to join them. Derrida argues that the government scorned the law by not acknowledging the receipt of communication, demonstrating the scorn of whites for their law. Derrida argues that the ones who made Mandela an outlaw showed a disregard for the law and were the ones who “placed themselves outside the law.”26 By describing his own outlawed condition, Mandela analyzes and reflects the outlawed being of the law in the name of which he was judged but persecuted, prejudged, judged a criminal beforehand, as if, in this endless trial, the trial had already taken place, before the investigation, whereas it has been endlessly adjourned …

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I have already pointed out that the choice of words here does not reflect the intensity of what was happening. It is true that to present the reasoned arguments that Mandela has made in the history of the struggle for human dignity in South Africa, he has had to do a lot of reflection. By presenting Mandela’s work as a reflection in the sense in which one reflects on a text, in this case, the legal code, one may be hiding the confrontation which the Other, in this case, Mandela and the South African Blacks brought to the Anti apartheid struggle. It was a confrontation that responded to white supremacy and its violence and in doing so Mandela and his community said, “stop murdering us.” Derrida portrays Mandela as a philosopher who has spoken and written, and the text has come to us for our reading, a reading from which we can draw out the unspoken message and what is signified in the text. Derrida wonders if this is a testament, and reflecting on this today; one would have to agree that it is indeed a testament to the fact that Mandela, the accused, is the one who had a positive attitude to the law because by rejecting laws that excluded the Blacks from rights they were entitled to in their own land, the white government failed to respect the law. The jailers once offered to exchange Mandela for Andrei Sakharov. Derrida does not say why they made that offer. Was that offer made because Mandela’s jailers could tolerate the Otherness of Sakharov more than that of Mandela? It is possible to see why. Sakharov, though not a South African, was white therefore had something in common with the white regime—white skin. But Mandela, a compatriot of the whites in South Africa, did not. Nevertheless, Mandela’s testament can be understood from two perspectives. First, one can receive it as something that bears witness to the past. Thus, reflection on it is reflection on something that will not return, “… a sort of West in general, the end of a trip which is also the trajectory from a luminous source, the end of an epoch … that of the Christian West (Mandela speaks its language, he is also an English Christian).”27 But there is a second way of receiving this testament. It can be seen as a witness that opens, enjoins, and confides “in others the responsibility of a future.”28 Derrida argues that Mandela’s statements and actions of protests by South Africans were a testament and acts of hope which expressed a desire that things ought to be different. For Mandela, it was not only to show himself, to give himself to be known, him and his people, it was also to reinstate the law for the future, as if, finally, it had never taken place. As if, having never been respected, it was to remain, this archancient thing that had never been present, as the future even-still now invisible.29

Derrida indicates that the Kantian notion of respect for a person “is first addressed to the law of which this person only gives us the example. Properly, respect is due only to the law, which is its sole cause … we must respect the Other … his irreplaceable singularity.”30 Derrida indicates as much when referring to Israel and South Africa as places where the full promise of the law has not yet been seen. In places like these, “exemplary witnesses” make distinctions between the law and laws, and between respect for the law that enable others to recognize the need to submit to positive law or even disregard it when the law does not fulfill

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its purpose in upholding human dignity and protecting members of the political community as the apartheid laws of South Africa. In Mandela’s actions, Derrida sees a promise in the actions of exemplars who know that in certain situations the best thing to do is not to respect the law. In such an instance, conscience, duty, and faith in the justice of the cause will have to come before one’s respect for the law. Mandela found such an example in Earl Russell. In his testimony before the judge, Mandela indicated that the philosopher Bertrand Russell was sentenced for “following his conscience in defiance of the law.”31 Mandela was forced by the White regime to disobey the law because it was racist and in so doing, Mandela kept the law. The movement for liberation in South Africa was not violent, but responded to state violence by seeking to defend themselves against unjust laws. Mandela’s political organization opted for self-defense by launching Umkonto we Sizwe (the Nation’s Spear) in order to respond to the violence, the government which directed at Blacks with impunity because it violated the laws of a civilized society. By forming an organization that was to respond to the violence of the State, Mandela was convicted through a sham legal process and sent to prison in August of 1962. Derrida ends this essay by wondering if Mandela would be remembered as one who in the past was made captive of his admiration for the law. Would he be the one who in the future anterior will be free, having known through admiration the thing that he should have and indeed admired? Will he be seen as “the one refusing as early as yesterday a conditioned freedom?” Derrida’s questions are rhetorical, but they state the grounds on which Mandela and other Blacks in South Africa confronted the illegal lawlessness of the apartheid ideology and practice in South Africa. Even when Mandela and the many South Africans who lived under the yoke of apartheid defied the laws of South Africa, they kept the law. The irony is that in keeping the law Mandela let himself be imprisoned. I contend that Derrida’s reflection on Mandela’s relationship to the law offers insights into one of the anchors of the politics of liberation. The law is formulated by parliaments and signed by heads of states. Mandela’s long admiration of the law which he uses to oppose apartheid produces “light” which Derrida sees as justice that is at the core of the political and moral ethos of a political community. Mandela’s contempt for the apartheid law holds “out to his adversaries the mirror in which they should recognize and see their own contempt for the law being reflected … this supplementary inversion … of Mandela. (is) respect for the law.”32 He notes that Mandela speaks with a royal “we.” Derrida notes that Mandela says “my people and I.” Derrida shows that it is not only in speeches but in actions, that Mandela’s reflection (struggle with totality) was social. He was part of an organization (the ANC) that took a stand against the illegal laws of South Africa. Mandela’s reflection on the pristine state of his homeland in which the principles of democracy were present reflects a social context in which people were welcomed and not divided into classes as the apartheid laws had done. Although Derrida draws from a text titled Nelson Mandela: The Struggle of My Life, it is clear that Mandela had a struggle because he spoke for a people that had a struggle.33 In this social context Derrida wonders, who is Mandela? I take this to be a rhetorical question because Derrida has already mapped out Mandela’s admiration

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of the law and commitment to law that he was willing to fight against unjust laws. Mandela’s fight for the liberation of South Africans may have broken laws, but he also called for the right laws that would ground the system of justice for everyone in South Africa. Mandela’s prophetic politics was effective because it was grounded on the law. Mandela’s prophetic context was South Africa where he reflected on laws and rejected South African laws at the time because they only create a false totality (The Union of South Africa created by the 1910 Constitution), but separated and excluded Mandela’s people who the white minority despised as Other. The law became a handmaid of spiritual politics which led to the liberation of South Africa, concretized that liberation for all people through the Truth and Reconciliation to ground political freedoms in a society where Mandela chose not to think that the country could be divided into victors and vanquished. Although it was a veritable human experiment, it was also legal and lawful politics at its best. In the rest of the chapter, I focus on Mandela’s spiritual politics to underscore the fact that if the law grounded the long resistance to apartheid, the spiritual Life of Mandela compelled him and the many South Africans who opposed what was crafted by the Afrikaner settlers as God-given country. The spiritual dimension of Mandela’s life shaped his moral, cultural, and political disposition. Mandela used these resources to motivate South Africans to reject, and then fight against the evil system of racial discrimination and segregation that was imposed on South Africans and later codified into the evil doctrine and political system of apartheid. Being spiritual in this system, in addition to appreciating the broad legal dimension of the political community, shaped Mandela’s Life and us drew on these resources to cultivate and build social relations that support and promote human dignity and promote the quest for justice. Individuals who cultivate these dispositions may claim divine inspiration, or their upbringing in a religious community and context, or may be influenced by the sacred texts of a religious tradition. I argue that President Nelson Mandela demonstrated such a spiritual disposition and one can describe his leadership as spiritual politics. From the Christian tradition, he was a member of the Methodist Church in South Africa. He cultivated a working relationship with faith leaders and all of these connections shaped his spiritual disposition to the struggle to free South Africa. The spiritual values which Mandela cultivated contributed to the relationships he built with family, his jailers, South Africans, and people around the world. While there is ample evidence that the church influenced Mandela, it is also the case that for some people, being spiritual may not and should not always involve membership in a religious community. One must say that it is the case that belonging to a faith community offers a person many opportunities to cultivate and grow one’s faith, but that is not always the case. Therefore, in a limited sense, what I call spiritual here will also refer to individual and communal values deployed to promote the common good. Such an approach to life is what has made Mandela such an admirable person and politician. Rethinking the role spirituality plays in politics by examining the legacy of Mandela is important because religion has continued to grow in Africa, making

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religion an important ingredient needed to carry out an appraisal of the political community, or conduct its autopsy. In the African context today, the idea of religion is extremely important as we have seen the exponential growth both in evangelical, Pentecostal, and mainline churches working to claim the public space. Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism have created a social and political context where many politicians in Africa have publicly embraced the ethos of these faith traditions but the teachings of these faith traditions seem to have no bearing on their political practice.34 Therefore, it is appropriate to think about Mandela’s politics as a form of spiritual practice because his public life demonstrates what Edith Wyschogrod described as a practice “defined in terms that both overlap and overturn traditional normative stipulations and that defy the normative structures of moral theory.”35 While Wyschogrod was concerned with moral theory and philosophical ethics, one can adopt her ideas to discuss the broad personal and social relations as a spiritual political engagement which prioritizes otherness and the dignity of all life in the political community. Spiritual politics in this sense is a political practice that recognizes and promotes well-being as the preeminent political praxis. In addition, such a political practice is spiritual because it prioritizes the human “spirit” understood broadly as our common humanity in a world where distinctions continue to despiritualize individual and social relations. Mandela’s political practice constitutes a spiritual and moral stewardship because he fought for, and advanced human well-being in a context where the promoters of apartheid, who dehumanized and deprived Blacks in South Africa from experiencing well-being, grounded their nefarious and dehumanizing project in their faith traditions.36 The apartheid system was what Alton Templin described as an ideology on the frontier that was grounded on color.37 The execution of such a historical project was meticulous and grounded in church teachings.38 Wyschogrod, especially, and scholars who have discussed the spiritual disciplines argue that persons who have acted to relieve the burdens of others are indeed saints because they have “put themselves totally at the disposal of the Other.”39 While I will not discuss Wyschogrod’s grounding of saintly life in postmodernism, I restate the compelling evidence that Mandela brought to public life a deliberate and reasoned approach to politics that privileged the other that was demonized and dominated in a system whose logic created the conditions of destruction of the Black race in South Africa. Wyschogrod argues that saintliness, and one could add spirituality, are moments and the grammar of narrative in its social context where the total chronology, though important, is not central, but where certain events that arise out of the inner life of the saint make a difference. These actions may include self-sacrifice, or a level of tolerance which some think is unacceptable.40 Wyschogrod argues: In the nonincarnational theology of Judaism, saintly presence expresses itself in the intersubjective realm as a response to the imago dei that marks each person. Even when saintly life is an expression of obedience to institutional norms or revealed laws, there can be no rules to guide that aspect of saintly work which

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admits of no conceivable realization, to fully represent the divine life or to fully realize the divine will … like the postmodern writer, the saint ‘is working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been.41

Mandela’s politics exemplifies this dimension of saintly life and spirituality. In Senegal, the founder of the Muridiya movement Cheikh Amadou Bamba grounded his work on a spirituality that refused to practice the politics of revenge, but instead used his teachings to invite his fellow Senegalese to improve the well-being of the people.42 Bamba brought barka, (blessing) to his people and Mandela and the many leaders who fought against apartheid brought freedom and liberation and reconciliation to his people. My concern with the “spiritual politics of Mandela” invites a rethinking of politics as an ethical and spiritual praxis and not necessarily Mandela’s religion. This essay is not an attempt to arbitrate between the different positions on Mandela’s religion, and the interest on Mandela’s religion and the claims some people have made that Mandela was an atheist. If one were to examine the full range of ideas that shaped Mandela, one could argue that he was not an atheist, but he combined a religious, secular, and the rich humanistic values on which he was raised and used these resources to fight and preserve those values for all people in South Africa (even the newcomers who had arrogated to themselves the right to define others as less human than their group as settlers on the South African frontier). In this regard, Mandela summoned the best of all human values to invite all people to experience the good, understood here as a free democratic society. A further perspective here is the view that Mandela was a religious person who grew up in the religious traditions of the Xhosa people. Mandela joined his relatives in the rich traditions and rituals of transition that have been documented very well in African and religious studies.43 Mandela stated that “circumcision represents the formal incorporation of male into society. It is not just a surgical procedure, but a lengthy and elaborate ritual in preparation for manhood. As a Xhosa, I count my years as a man from the date of my circumcision.”44 Mandela stated that going through the ceremony made him a man among his own people and some day would fulfill his obligations, marry, raise a family, but for now there were still amakhankatha, new initiates into the adult world.45 Yet these rituals also recognized the humanity of Mandela’s people. Mandela reports that Chief Meligquili recognized the newly circumcised young and future leaders of the Xhosa nation, but argued that they would not assume the manhood they were destined to take. He told them: For we Xhosas, and all black South Africans, are a conquered people. We are slaves in our own country. We are tenants on our own soil. We have no strength, no power, no control over our own destiny in the land of our birth. They will go into cities where they will live in shacks and drink cheap alcohol all because we have not land to give them where they could prosper and multiply. They will cough their lungs out deep in the bowels of the white man’s mines, destroying their health, never seeing the sun, so that the white man can live a life of

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unequalled prosperity. Among these men are chiefs who will never rule because we have no power to govern ourselves; soldiers who will never fight for we have no weapons to fight with; scholars who will never teach because we have no place for them to study. The abilities, the intelligence, the promise of these young men will be squandered in their attempt to eke out a living doing the simplest, most mindless chores for the white man. These gifts today are naught, for we cannot give them the greatest gift of all, which is freedom and independence. I well know that Qamata is all-seeing and never sleeps, but I have a suspicion that Qamata may in fact be dozing. If this is the case, the sooner I die the better because then I can meet him and shake him awake and tell him that the children of Ngubengcuka, the flower of the Xhosa nation, are dying.46

I have quoted this passage in its entirety because Mandela himself says that he and many others that day dismissed the speech as the words of an upstart chief who did not understand the benefits the whites had brought to his community. Mandela added: “But without exactly understanding why, his words soon began to work in me. He had planted a seed, and though I let that seed lie dormant for a long season, it eventually began to grow. Later, I realized that the ignorant man that day was not the chief but myself.”47 Mandela writes that although he was not to look back and see the destruction of the lodges when the ceremonies and seclusion time was over, he did and saw a heap of ashes which was what remained of “a lost and delightful world, the world of my childhood, the world of sweet and irresponsible days at Qunu and Mqhekezweni. Now I was a man … Looking back, I know that I was not a man that day and would not truly become one for many years.”48 This initiation gave him an identity with his people and he took the name Dalibunga that means “founder of the council.” These indigenous beliefs and rituals were formative events for the future leader of South Africa, although their chief told them after the initiation “that they would never really be men because they were a conquered people who were slaves in their own country.”49 Mandela grew up with a spirituality which was grounded in local religious ideals. Those spiritual values opened a world for him because his traditional spiritual background enabled him to see the contradictions of the world of an imposed civilization that was at odds with Mandela’s Xhosa traditions. The colonial reality in which they lived robbed them of their rights, but it did not kill the spirit in persons like Mandela who were willing to affirm and fight for their traditions, rights, and a world where people were treated with dignity. In addition to religion, Mandela was raised on values that would build an inclusive society where the rights and dignity of all people would be respected. Mandela was convinced that changing the world had to start somewhere and he was committed to work for that change.50 Mandela argued that he could only change others if he changed himself. He believed that as human beings we are called to change the lives of other people for good. Hence, “The Church was as concerned with this world as the next: I saw that virtually all of the achievements of Africans seemed to have come about through the missionary work of the Church.”51 Those who argue that Mandela was a Christian sometimes think that

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he rejected communism when he became President because of his Christian faith. This view overstates the case why Mandela was not a communist, but rejecting communism had more to do with the direction Mandela and his management team, which included Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, felt the country should take. Throughout his Life, Mandela has given us signals that he is a spiritual person and this is manifested in the moral values and standards he set throughout the antiapartheid movement that prioritized the dignity of all persons in South Africa. In his famous autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela said there were two governing principles in his Life at Mqhekezweni, chieftaincy and the church. These two doctrines existed in uneasy harmony although I did not then see them as antagonistic. For me, Christianity was not so much a system of beliefs as it was the powerful creed of a single man: Reverend Matyolo. For me, his powerful presence embodied all that was alluring in Christianity. He was as popular and beloved as the regent, and the fact that he was the regent’s superior in spiritual matters made a strong impression on me. But the Church was as concerned with this world as the next: I saw that virtually all of the achievements of Africans seemed to have come about through the missionary work of the church. The mission schools trained the clerks, the interpreters, and the policemen, who at the time represented the height of African aspirations.52

As Mandela observed, Rev. Matyolo was an effective communicator, a fire and brimstone preacher who combined African “animism” and taught a powerful God who also punished wrongdoing. Mandela recognized the important role indigenous religions and the Christianity played in the lives of people. While he was a member of the Christian church, Mandela was not a doctrinaire Christian. Mandela himself tells us “at Qunu, the only time I had ever attended church was on the day that I was baptized. Religion was a ritual that I indulged in for my mother’s sake and to which I attached no meaning.” This changed because at Mqhekezweni, religion was part of the fabric of life and I attended church each Sunday along with the regent and his wife. The regent took his religion seriously. In fact, the only time that I was ever given a hiding by him was when I dodged a Sunday service to take part in a fight against boys from another village, a transgression I never committed again.53

One could also read a resistance to organized religion, but it was present and Mandela often recognized its impact on the lives of the members of the community. Mandela’s spiritual formation was further grounded through his education in a church school run by the Methodist Church. He was given the name Nelson as many Africans took western names when they joined the church or were baptized. When his father died, Mandela went to live with the Regent Jongintaba. He joined the family in church services every Sunday morning and it was clear to him that the church was interested in this world and the next world.54 Mandela continued with his studies in Methodist Schools, and studied the liberal arts at Healdtown

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College where Mandela became aware of his Xhosa and African identity in that order.55 Mandela also learned from Reverend Mokitimi who was house master that an African can stand his ground with a white man. At Fort Hare University, Mandela joined the Student Christian Association and on Sundays went around the villages to teach Bible classes.56 Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni, was a woman of faith and inspired Mandela.57 The values he learned from his mother and from the royal court prepared Mandela for the long struggle to promote liberation and transformative justice. Mandela’s upbringing prepared him to embrace a critical interpretation of history on religious terms and a good example is when the commemoration of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck was renamed “A National Day of Pledge and Prayer.”58 The anti-apartheid leaders pledged to work until all the people of South Africa were free. One of the persons who influenced Mandela was The Reverend S. M. Mokitimi, who impressed Mandela and other students because he stood up to the then head of the Healdtown School, the Reverend Wellington, who himself reminded people that he was related to the Duke of Wellington. Mandela said that seeing this confrontation taught him one of the crucial lessons on race relations, “a black man did not have to defer automatically to a white person, however senior he was.”59 This attitude of standing up to one’s rights as a human being is what Allan Boesak would later describe as “the courage to be.”60 In preparation for leadership Mandela was sent to the Methodist School at Clarkebury, named after British theologian Dr. Adam Clarke. Mandela’s great grandfather King Ngubengcuka donated the land on which the school was built. The education Mandela received from the mission school shaped him to be the champion of all human liberties. Mandela appreciated the work of the missionaries, but criticized their paternal and imperial practices. After his education at Clarkebury, Mandela attended Healdtown School, established by Sir Harry who had subdued the Xhosa people. He named the school after James Heald, a Methodist Minister who was a Member of the British Parliament. Sampson argues that these schools did not make a religious impact on Mandela and he did not become a “true believer” although Mandela cherished the disciplines he learned at these schools even though racism was prevalent as some whites did not want to eat or associate with Blacks. He always remained Xhosa in spirit and made connections with many of the Xhosa boys at the school who would later join the ANC such as Jimmy Njongwe, a physician who helped organize the Defiance Campaign. Students attending Healdtown protested and exercised their rights to decry injustice, especially when the Herzog Bills which erased the names of Blacks from the voting rolls and denied them the privilege of property rights were introduced in parliament.61 During his student days, Mandela cultivated a social and spiritual demeanor that was oriented to the other. One example is his friendship with his cousin Kaiser Matanzima whom Mandela admired greatly during their days at Fort Hare. Sampson argues that Mandela’s association with nobles did not hinder him from treated others with respect, including people thought to be commoners like Oliver Tambo.62 The future collaboration between them would shape the work of the

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ANC and transformed it into a formidable liberation movement. In a curious way, whether through mission education or state education as Fort Hare University, Mandela rejected the notion that Europeans brought a higher culture to his people. He concurred with the view that “they [Europeans] have been in some sense a missionary race, but if salvation is ever to come to the native peoples of South Africa it will finally have to come from themselves.”63 His journey through school in the early years of his life prepared him to demonstrate what I consider spiritual maturity. Mandela refused to serve on the student council when only a quarter of students had voted. He would be dismissed from Fort Hare for this show of independent thinking. Mandela left home to avoid marrying a woman who did not love him and he too did not love her. Mandela later said that these turns opened a wider world for him and “[he] could see the history and culture of my own people as part of and parcel of the history and culture of the entire human race.”64 In his address to the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1988, Mandela commended the WCC for its work and dedication to end apartheid in South Africa. The WCC had created an office to coordinate the anti-apartheid struggle and appointed the Reverend Barney Pityana, a South African Anglican Priest who was in exile in Great Britain to head that office. Mandela told the delegates in Harare, “You have to have been in an apartheid prison in South Africa to appreciate the further importance of the church.”65 Finally, as part of the popular discourse, Peter Oborne argued that Mandela could be compared to Jesus Christ and stated: “there are very few human beings who can be compared to Jesus Christ. Nelson Mandela is one. This is because he was a spiritual leader as much as a statesman. His colossal moral strength enabled him to embark on new and unimaginable forms of action.”66 However, Observers who have taken conservative political views have always worried about Mandela’s relationship to progressive groups and political leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and his support for communist and revolutionary leaders in South Africa and around the world was received with skepticism by some leaders around the world. But Mandela celebrated leaders who championed and supported freedom for the South Africans from the yoke of apartheid. On a visit to Cuba, Mandela praised Castro and “Cuban internationalists [who] have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice … We too want to control our destiny … There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedomloving people.”67 Mandela demonstrated that he was and remains in a class of his own because he used his moral and spiritual dispositions to give people a vision of a common humanity. I contend that these spiritual resources, more than organized religion, motivated Mandela to be a champion of love rather than hatred for his political enemies. He said, “no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”68 Faith communities were important to Mandela.

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He joined the Methodist Church in September 1929. When he attended Fort Hare University, he taught Sunday School. In one of his letters to his daughter from Robben Island where he was a prisoner for so many years on March 27, 1977, Mandela wrote: “As you know, I was baptized in the Methodist Church and was educated in Wesleyan schools-Clarkebury, Healdtown and at Fort Hare. I stayed at Wesley House. At Fort Hare I even became a Sunday School teacher.”69 During his time as a student at different schools, Mandela carried a spiritual demeanor that was a sense of orientation to the others. One example is his friendship with his cousin Kaiser Matanzima whom Mandela admired greatly during their days at Fort Hare. Sampson argues that Mandela’s association with nobles did not hinder him from treating others with respect, including people thought to be commoners like Oliver Tambo.70 The future collaboration between them would shape the work of the ANC and transformed it into a formidable liberation movement. In a curious way, whether through mission education or state education at Fort Hare University, Mandela rejected the notion that Europeans brought a higher culture to his people. He concurred with the view that “they [Europeans] have been in some sense a missionary race, but if salvation is ever to come to the native peoples of South Africa will finally have to come from themselves.”71 His journey through school in the early years of his life prepared him to demonstrate what I consider spiritual maturity. Mandela refused to serve on the student council when only a quarter of students had voted. He would be dismissed from Fort Hare for this show of independent thinking. Mandela also decided to leave home to avoid marrying a woman who did not love him and he did not love her. Mandela would say later that these turns opened a wider world for him and “[he] could see the history and culture of my own people as part of and parcel of the history and culture of the entire human race.”72 Mandela would speak about the role of Mission institutions and churches in South Africa when he addressed the World Parliament of Religion in Cape Town in 1999. He said: This coming together here in this southernmost city on the African continent of representatives from such a wide range of the faiths of the world symbolizes the acknowledgement of our mutual interdependence and common humanity. It is to me a humbling experience to be part of this moving expression and reaffirmation of the nobility of the human spirit.73

I like to link the idea of the human spirit to what I am calling broadly spirituality and linking it to his politics. Mandela was concerned about the human spirit and its cultivation because he noted that the age in which we live is full of violence. As Mandela pointed out that there had been a lot of destruction and other forms of injustice, strife, and divisions that caused so much pain and suffering. He argued that as humans we have enormous capacity to inflict pain on others. While he admitted that there were many reasons for humanity to be cynical about life, the actions of faith communities could reject “despair and cynicism” and recognize and reaffirm the generosity and caring nature of the human spirit.74 Mandela

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accepted an award from The World Parliament of Religions dedicated the award “to those millions and millions of ordinary unsung men and women all over the world who throughout this century courageously refused to bow to the baser instincts of our nature and to live their lives in pursuit of peace, tolerance, and respect for differences.”75 Mandela called for religious tolerance because all the religions educated people and passed on to them important human values. Mandela made this speech after one of the greatest demonstrations of spiritual politics and signature project of his approach to human dignity, Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town, was completed. Mandela was retired at the time, however, in speaking of the past, he also looked forward to the future, calling on the delegates to think of all people of the world who deserve a decent life. Many still live in poverty and experience “massive inequality” and there is warfare and conflicts in many places around the world, and the powerful still dominate all others. Therefore, “The symbolic turn of the century calls us to a commitment to make the coming century one in which these and other issues of human development are fundamentally addressed.” There are different ways of doing this, and one can think of all the materials written about achieving justice, peace, stability, economic development, but Mandela argued that day: We shall have to reach deep into the wells of our human faith as we approach the new century. No less than in any other period of history, religion will have a crucial role to play in guiding and inspiring humanity to meet the enormous challenges that we face. In our South African society, we have identified as a crucial need for our efforts at material and social development and new construction to be matched and accompanied by what is called an RDP of the souls-a moral reconstruction and development program. That is no less true of our entire world.

Mandela took on different leadership positions within the ANC and supported a change from the non-violence tactics when the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the spear of the nation, was formed and Mandela was named commander in chief. On the question of using force, Mandela said that Jesus used force to drive out evil, an indication that Mandela and the other leaders of the African National Congress believed that the armed struggle was necessary to free South Africa from white domination. When the struggle escalated, Mandela and his colleagues who had always seen fighting injustice as spiritual practice were tried by the Apartheid regime, convicted of High treason, and sentenced to serve life terms on Robben Island. Mandela’s faith remained strong even in prison. Religious ministers visited them in prison on Robben held Bible studies with him, gave him communion, and nurtured his faith. The leaders who were jailed built friendships, sang songs together, and said evening prayers to stay focused on the fight for justice. Taking Holy Communion was such an important ritual for them that Mandela invited one of the jailers to join them. The invitation to a jailer to join them convinced the

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visiting priest Harry Wiggertt that Mandela was a deeply spiritual person. When American journalists interviewed Mandela, they raised the communism question that the apartheid regime had used to brand Mandela as a non-Christian. But Mandela affirmed his faith, telling them he had always been a Methodist. Church leaders in South Africa recognized Mandela’s faith, and even at Bishopscourt in Cape Town, Archbishop Russel praised him for his Christian conviction. Mandela emphasized the critical role of rethinking social inequities in a globalized world. The escalation of poverty in a world that is at the same time marked by such opulence and excessive wealth, the suffering and marginalization of vulnerable groups at a time when the concepts of democracy and equality are supposed to have become universal, the growing degradation of the environment often caused by the greed of industrial development. These are some of the contradictions that are moral and ethical questions.

Noting that religion has its challenges and citing grave injustices committed in the name of religion and the many conflicts and acts of intolerance perpetrated in the name of religion, he challenged religious leaders and the faithful “to draw on those critical resources that have made it such a central part of human life throughout the ages. Few other dimensions of human life reach such a massive following as the religious. Its roots are in every nook and cranny of society where political leaders and the economically powerful have no sway.” Mandela, who had experienced injustice most of his life and later led the way for the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, understood what he was talking about when he said: No government or social agency can on its own meet the enormous challenges of development of our age … In drawing upon its spiritual and communal resources, religion can be a powerful partner in such causes as meeting the challenges of poverty, alienation, the abuse of women and children, and the destructive disregard for our natural environment.76

He invited the nation and the rest of the world to recognize that everyone is responsible for being kind to one another. I have argued that a careful reading of Mandela’s politics demonstrates that Mandela admired the law as the basis of a constitutional and just society. In resisting the sham constitutional and legal foundations on which apartheid was crafted and executed in South Africa to expropriate the land and resources and exclude Blacks who were the rightful owners of the land where they had settled for centuries before the arrival of the Dutch, Mandela drew from the spiritual resources of local indigenous religions and his Methodist upbringing, to resist an unlawful white apartheid state and its spiritual and legal system, which balkanized Blacks and brutalized their traditions and personhood. Mandela’s legal and spiritual politics earned the admiration of South Africans and an international community, making him one of the most admired freedom fighters of the twentieth century,

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as Barak Obama said at Mandela’s funeral. Mandela’s commitment to the law and spiritual disposition remains a shining example for African politicians. In the African context where the “big man” syndrome still dominates politics, Mandela’s example should be emulated so that political leaders, who frequent houses of worship, may cultivate a spiritual disposition in politics that also embraces the laws of their countries.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Dennis Cruywagen, The Spiritual Mandela: Faith and Religion in the Life of Nelson Mandela (Cape Town, Penguin Random House, South Africa, 2018), p. 121. Jere Surber, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle 1959; 2nd, revised ed. (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974). J. Alton Templin, Ideology on a Frontier: The Theological Foundation of Afrikaner Nationalism 1652–1910 (Newport: Greenwood Press, 1984). Allan Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study of Black Theology and Black Power (Eugen, OR: Wipf and Stock, reissued May 1, 2015). Nelson Mandela, https://equitablegrowth.org/nelson-mandela-april-20-1964-i-havecherished-the-ideal-of-a-democratic-and-free-society-it-is-an-ideal-which-i-hopeto-live-for-and-to-achieve-but-if-needs-be-it-is-an-ideal-for-which-i-am/ accessed January 1, 2022. Derrida, Jacques, and Mustapha Tlili, eds. For Nelson Mandela, (New York: Seaver Books, 1987, p. 16. Derrida and Tilli, Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 20. Derrida and Tilli, p. 21. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 22. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 23. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 24. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 27. Derrida and Tilli, p. 29. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 32. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida and Tilli, p. 37. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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Derrida and Tilli, p. 39. Derrida and Tilli, p. 36. Nelson Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1990). See, Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Toyin Falola, Violence in Nigeria: The Crises of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2000). 35 Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xiii. 36 Robert Vooslo, “Christianity and Apartheid in South Africa,” in The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa, ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 400–23. 37 Templin, Ideology on a Frontier. 38 Vosloo, “Christianity and Apartheid in South Africa,” pp. 400–23. 39 Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism Revisioning Moral Philosophy, p. xiii. See also p. xv. See also Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 40 Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism Revisioning Moral Philosophy, p. 6, 13. 41 Wyschogrod, p. 13. 42 A. Roberts and M Nooter Roberts, p. 63; Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts, “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,” African Arts (Winter, 2002). See also, Cheikh Adallah Salihu Sufi, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba: The Path of the Murid Sadiq (Underground Railroad Book Publishers, 2017); Michelle R. Kimball, Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba: A Peacemaker for out Time (Kuala Lumpur: The Other Press, 2019); Qiyamah Abdallah, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba: Life Teachings and Poetry (Touba Café Publishing, 2008). 43 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, revised ed. (London: Abacus, 1995), p. 31. 44 See also Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 2–3; Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 19; Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985); Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998), p. 142. 45 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 31. 46 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 32. 47 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 32. 48 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 32. 49 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 32. 50 http://www.christiantoday.com/article/nelson.mandela.and.his.faith/34956.htm, accessed September 25, 2014. 51 http://www.christiantoday.com/article/nelson.mandela.and.his.faith/34956.htm, accessed September 25, 2014. 52 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 27. 53 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 27. 54 Cruywagen, p. 28. 55 Cruywagen, p. 32. 56 These leaders were “Oliver Tambo, Robert Mugabe, Seretse Khama, Dennis Brutus, Govan Mbeki, Robert Sobukwe,” Cruywagen, p. 36. 57 Cruywagen, p. 40.

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58 Cruywagen, p. 55. 59 Ibid. 60 Allan A. Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Soci-Ethical Study on Black Theology and Power (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1977). 61 Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 21. 62 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 21. 63 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 23. 64 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 29. 65 http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1998/981213_churches.htm. Accessed April 7, 2021. 66 https://everydayreligions.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/nelson-mandela-a-20thcentury-jesus/, accessed April 28, 2021. 67 Nelson Mandela, speech delivered on a visit to Cuba in 1991. 68 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 348. 69 Archive.nelsonmandela.org/exhibit/nelson-mandela-early-life/gRmTCoYE? position=5%2CO accessed September 23, 2014. 70 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 21. 71 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 23. 72 Anthony Sampson, 1999, p. 29. 73 https://parliamentofreligions.org/parliament/1999-cape-town/nelson-mandelasspeech-1999-parliament, accessed April 5, 2021. 74 http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/news/index.php/2013/12/nelson-mandelasspeech-to-1999-parliament-still-soars-full-text/, accessed April 7, 2021. 75 https://parliamentofreligions.org/blog/2020-06-10-2042/nelson-mandelas-speech1999-parliament-still-soars-full-text, accessed April 7, 2021. 76 https://parliamentofreligions.org/blog/2020-06-10-2042/nelson-mandelas-speech1999-parliament-still-soars-full-text, accessed April 7, 2021.

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INDEX Absolute knowing 22, 23 Absolute knowledge 66, 71 Activity 36 Actual 37–8 Aesthetics 10–13, 122, 124, 133–152 Chroma Keying 129 Ideas 81 Music and images 128 Relationship to the world 125 Special news programs 126 Stage set and format design 127 ZDF Spezial 126 Afrikaner 183 Afrikanerdom 178 Arrogance 183 Brutalization of land 183 Domination 178 Native Lands Act 183 Native peoples 192, 193 Settlers 186 Ambiguity 50, 52, 53, 61 Anderson, William 9–10, 89–96 Angel of death 139 Antimony 41 Aposteriori necessity 9–10, 89–96 Arendt, Hannah 85 Aristophanes m4 Aristotle 33 Assumptions 33–4 Autonomy 17 Badiou, Allain 110 Barthes, Roland 99, 107 Baudelaire 101 Baudrillard, Jean 97, 98 Beauty 81 Becoming 36, 41, 169 Being 29, 31, 34, 36–39, 41, 69 Beneirgem, Raoul 101 Bernhaardi, A.F. 135, 136 Images 136 Linguistic signs 136

Poetry and philosophy 137 Signs 136 Term of art 137 Blondell, Ruby 64 Body 54 55, 56, 57, 58, 60 Bongmba, Elias K. xi–xii, 1–16, 177–198 Bourdieu, Pierre 122, 123 Buren, Daniel 12–13, 155–164 Bush George 110 Café des Milles Colonnes 158 Camille Desmoulin’s Aux armes 158 Campbell, Alastair V. 170–171, 174–175 Camus 116 The Plague 115 Carazan’s dream 138, 140 Angel of death 139 Closed his heart to others 139 Conviction to live for others 139 Dream told in the tradition of the Christian faith 149 Experience of dread 139 Flight 139 White noise 140, 144 Cartesianism 154, 155, 157 Category 36, 40–1 Chaplain 13, 168–172, 173–75 Chaplain as Wise Fool 165, 168–172 Chenu 101 Children 103 Chirac, Jacques 154 Christian/Christianity 165–172 Cinematic semiotics and ruins 155, 157–159 Climacus, Johannes (St. John of the Ladder) 13, 165–169 Clinton, Bill 110 Clinton, Hilary 110 Cohabitation 154 Coherence 47 Comic 165–166

212

Index

communicability 75, 76 (in an aesthetic experience), 82 Community 51, 55 Concept 48 Consciousness 20–23, 50, 54, 56 Consumer 59 Copernican revolution 77, 78, 84 Copula 32, 35, 43, 48, 49–50, 53, 56, 61 Correspondence 48 Covid-19, 112 Culture 111, 121–122, 147 Anthropology and culture 177 Critiques of culture 177 Culture and criticism 117, 130 Europeans and culture 193 Imperial culture 178 South African culture 184, 192, 193 Cytherean Flight 158–159 Daniel Buren 155–164 Dante 101 Data 58, 59 Death 59, 69–170 Fear of death 11–12, 134–135, 140–149 Debord Guy 10, 97, 102, 112 The Society of the Spectacle (La Societe’ du Spectacle) 10, 97–110, 114, 117–119 Deleuze, Gilles 32 DeLillo, Don 11–12, 134, 141 Demagogy 53 Democracy 178, 109 Concepts of democracy 197 Democracy and collective action 117 Greek history democracy 104 In South Africa 183 Multiracial democracy 14 Parliamentary democracy 180 Principles of democracy 185, 197 Revolutionary democracy 184 Western democracy 184 World democracy 184 Derrida Jacques 70, 99, 193 Violence and Metaphysics 70 Desire 54 Desmond, William 1, 14, 166, 172 Determinate being (Dasein) 36, 38–40 determinate judgment 23, 81, 82 Determinations of reflection 43 Détournement 1, 12, 101, 156–157

Deux Plateaux 12–13, 155–164 Dialectic 29–31, 38–41 Difference 51 Dikova-Milanova, Miglena ix, 11–12, 133–152 Dilthey, Wilhelm 177 Discipline 59, 60 Dogmatism 52, 58 Dorner, Andreas 10–11, 121–132 Duschamp, Marcel 124 Eagleton, Terry 70 Eber, Marx 122 Eco, Umberto 153–154, 157 Education 52 Emergence 37–8, 41 Essence 30, 37–9, 51, 58 Eternal/eternity 35, 39, 166–167, 169–170 Euclidian geometry 67 Faber, Heije 169–170, 174 Falsidical paradox 9 Fascism 53 Feeling 58 Feuerbach 100 Fichte, J. 17, 19, 25, 48, 75 fin de siècle 177 finitude 77 Forbes, Dr. James 113 Forgotten child (of philosophy) 8, 67–71 Foucault, Michel 99 Frankfurt School 122, 177 free play of imagination 84 Freedom 1–4, 17, 18, 25, 59, 100 Fukuyama, Francis 99 Future 68, 70–71 Geerts, Clifford 177 German Idealism/idealists 2–8, 11–12, 17–18, 25–26 German media and television 10–11 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 153, 157 Gladney Jack 140–145 God 29–31, 35, 39, 165–172 Habituation 55, 60 Hamann J. 76 Hegel, G. Wilhelm Friedrich Xi–xiii, 1–8, 13–15, 17–28, 29–43, 71, 165–167 Master Slave 7–8, 55, 58, 67, 70–71

Index Phenomenology of Spirit 5–8, 19–28, 71 Predicate 29–31, 34–5, 37–40 Predicates 45, 50 Predication 52, 56, 57, 60 Science of Logic 6, 22–23, 27–28 Speculative sentence 6–7 Subject predicate 7–8 The Encyclopedia 25, 28 The Philosophy of Right 25, 28 Heidegger, Martin 66, 77, 177 Being and Time 69 Heidelberg SINUS Institute 112 Heraclitus 101 Herder, J. 75, 77 hermeneutics 51, 52, 77 History 61 Hitler, Adolf 104, 136, 144–45, 147, 150–51 Hölderlin, Friedrich 48 Horizon/horizon of meaning 77, 79–80, 83, 85, 87n Houlgate, Stephen 5–7, 29–44 Hugo Victor 153, 157–158 Hume David 20, 27, 75, 79 Humor 165–174 Identity 51 Identity 31–3, 36, 38, 43 And difference 30–2 Ideology 122 Illusion of contingency 9–10, 94 imagination 81, 84 Incognito (Religious) 168 Indeterminate immediacy 23–24 Indirect communication 168 Infinity, bad 55 Irony 166–67

213

Literary and philosophical accounts 139 Metakritik 135 Philosophy 133 Sensible 139 Stylistic diversity 133 Third Critique 141 Transcendental philosophy 39 Use of language 134 Kendi, Ibram X. 110, 111 Kierkegaard, Søren 166 Concept of Irony 166 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 13, 165–174 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses Either/Or 166 Works of Love 167–168 King, Dr. Martin Luther 112 Klockohn, Clyde 111 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 11–12, 68, 134–35, 145 On the sublime 146 Purpose of culture 147 The End 11–12, 133–134, 145–149 Knowledge 19, 20, 21, 63, 66, 67 Kripke, Saul 9–10, 89–96 Krobeber, Alfred 111

Judgment 31, 33–9, 41, 43–47, 49, 50, 56–57 empirical/ordinary 35, 40 metaphysical 35, 39, 44 negative 43

Language 29–31, 33, 40, 46, 53 Language in Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy 17, 19, 25 Language in German Idealism 5–9 Le Monde 114 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 36 Lelong, Guy 153–155 les evenements de soixante huit 111 Liberals 107 Life 54, 56, 58 Lived experience 97 logos (as language) 77 love 83 Luhmann Niklas 123 Lyotard Jean-François 85

Kant, Immanuel xi–xiii, 1–3, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 26, 31–2, 49, 133 Aesthetics of the sublime 134, 135 Beautiful and sublime 138 Language of philosophy 135 Language of the sublime 138

Maker William 5–6, 14, 17–28, 43 Malantschuk, Gregor 165–166, 172–173 Mandela 3, 14, 177–198 African National Congress 180 Commanded admiration 179 Home land 183

214 Human rights 180 Law 179 Legal and Spiritual politics 192 Parliamentary democracy 180 White liberals 180 Manzinger Robert xi–xii, 1–16, 165–177 Marcuse, Herbert Reason and Revolution 17, 28 Martensen, Bushop Hans Larsen 166, 172 Marx, Karl 10, 18, 24, 28, 63, 70, 99, 100, 102 Marxists 97 Mass media 97 McLuhan, Marshall 97, 98 Meaning 46, 50–52, 57–59, 77–78, 84 meaningful 75, 79, 80, 83 Media 97, 98 Meno (character in Plato’s dialogue) 8, 63–74 metaphor 40, 83 Metaphysics 29, 31, 36 Post-Kantian 33 Pre-Kantian 33, 35, 37 metaphysics 29, 31, 36, 75, 80, 85n post-Kantian 33 pre-Kantian 33 Mitterrand Francois 154 Modian Patrick 100 Monad 36 Movement 32–3, 37, 39, 41 of being 36 of negative 29 of prediction 30 Of the preposition 29–30, 39 Of thought 32 Mukařovský, Jan 124 Murray 143 music (as language) 84 Names 45, 61 Nature Philosophy 47, 55 Negative 29 Negativity 58, 59 New Classicism 155–156, 160 Nieft, Jared 8, 63–74 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 18, 26, 64 Thus Spoke Zarusthustra 64 Nora Pierre 153–154 Nothing 36, 38–9, 41

Index Novalis 62 Nuridsany Michel 154 Obama Barak 106 Objectivity 46, 50 Odysses 67 Orwell, George 103 Palimpsest 156 Parmenides 101 Passivity 36 Patrimony 157, 159–160 Percesepe Gary 11, 97–120 Phenomenology 33 Philosophy and Its Others xiii, 1, 5, 13–14, 165, 172 Plato 101 Meno 8, 63–74 Republic 64, 74 playful roaming 56 Plessner Helmut 125 Politics 53, 62 Politics as spectator sport 108 Poor People’s Campaign 112 Postmodernism 141 Presupposition/Presuppositionless 6–7, 23, 33–4, 43 Quantity 38–9 Quincey Thomas De 133 Quine, W.V.O 9, 17, 26 Racial capital 114 Received Ideas 159 Recollection 63–64, 66, 70 Reflective judgment 81 Reid Jeffrey 7–8, 45–62 Religion, philosophy of 47 Religiousness A, B, and C 167–68 Representation 97, 100 Resolve (Entschluß) 33 Rhizome 153, 157 Ricoeur Paul 85 Sandel, Michel 110 Schalow, Frank 6, 9–10, 75–88 Schleiermacher Friedrich 177 Schmidt Dennis J. 75 Schulze Gerhard 122

Index Schütz, Alfred 123 Science 46, 47, 48, 50, 53 Self-Determination 17, 25, 27–28 self-reflexivity 75, 79, 82 semiotics 12–13, 161 Sensus communis 9–10, 82 Sex 56 Shakespeare 101, 166 Signs 54, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60 Simmel George 122 Simulacrum 99 Singular 33, 43 Skepticism 58 Slavery 63 Laurion mine laborers 64 Slave attendant (boy) 63–71 Smith Winston 103 Smith, Shaw 12–13, 155–164 Sociology of Knowledge 123 Socrates 63–74, 166–167 Soeffner, Hans–Georg 123 South Africa 13 Spectacle 10, 97, 100 concept of 100 history of 103 integrated power of spectacle 98 integrated spectacle 102 Speculative Sentence 6–8, 31–2, 40–1 Grammatical 48 Logic 36–7, 40–1 Proposition 29–34, 39, 43 Proposition/sentence (Satz) 29–34, 37–42 Stewart, Jon 166, 172 Subject 29–31, 33–39, 41 and predicate 29–35, 43 conscious 30, 36 grammatical–psychical 45, 53, 60 knowing 36 Subject/object 19–20 Subject–predicate 7–8 Subjectivity 57 Sublime 11–12, 133–152 Surber Jere 1–15, 29–34, 36, 39–42, 61, 98, 115, 116, 165 Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of

215

Cultural Studies 11 “Hegel’s Speculative Sentence” 6–7 Jere Surber xi–xiii, 1–15 Language and German Idealism, Philosophy 5 Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German Idealism 12 What Is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality xiii, 5 Syllogism 46 Telemachus 67 Templin Alton 178 Temporality 51 Thought 29, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 39 (das Denken) 49 Thought 29, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 34–7, 39–40 –Time (in schematism), 78 Transcendental 48 ideas 78, 80, 83 imagination 78 transcendental ideas 80, 83 transcendental turn 79 Trump Donald 10–11, 106–107, 110 Truth 64, 66, 67 Truth and Reconciliation 197 Tutu, Desmond 194 Understanding (Verstand) 58 Unity 31–5 Unity 32–3 Universal 33, 37–8, 43 unthought, the (das Ungedachte) Vanishing 51, 52 Veridical paradox 9 Virtue 63–66, 70–71 Vogt, Ludgera 10–11, 121–132 Wall Street 113 Warren, Senator Elizabeth 111 Westphal, Merold 168 Winfield, Richard Dien 43 wise fool 13, 165, 169–172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus 21–22, 27 Words 50, 52, 54, 56–57, 60

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