In Search of the True Hegel

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I want to thank Mark Cauchi and Christopher Irwin for reading my review-essay and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. When, in a single paragraph of my review-essay, I cite consecutively two or more passages from the same page of Hegel & the Infinite, the page number is given at the end of the last passage cited.

2. An apt example of the constipated reading of Hegel, as found among those committed to postmodern deconstruction, and for which Žižek has his ready remedy, is provided by Roger W. H. Savage in his Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010). Savage writes, for example, that in a composition like Erwartung Schoenberg gives us a sense “of suspenseful foreboding” by “shattering the Hegelian confidence in history and reason” (118). What Savage fails to see, however, is that, Hegel, like all our great modern thinkers and artists, constantly tests our confidence in history and reason by showing us that we have always to confront the “confidence man,” the con-artist who tests the confidence that we have in (our) history and reason. It is precisely faith (con-fidence) that gives rise to deception, to false confidence or security in history and reason. Still, in what can we truly have confidence if not in our history and our reason?

3. Desmond acknowledges the importance of “the unconditional” in Kant (see 133). Yet, he claims that Kant does not see that the “unconditional is given before one’s freedom to determine oneself” (137). Surely, however, what Kant shows us is that, in willing unconditionally—in undertaking to treat all human beings as ends in themselves (as persons), not as means (things), in doing unto others what I want others to do unto me—the freedom of my self-determination is not prior to the unconditionality of the other. Rather, the freedom of my self-determination is constituted by the unconditionality of the other.

4. We thus see why Buber understands the I-thou relation as the in-between and why Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, understands God as the “third” (partner) in the loving relationship between self and other: each of the two is the third but only in and through the other. Neither “possesses” or “masters” (the power/the weakness of) the third.

5. It is a severe shortcoming of the essays in this collection that their authors, given that many of them, to their credit, do focus on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, do not make key doctrines of biblical ontology central to their discussion, above all, the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and of sin. Thus, they do not discuss the several commentaries that Hegel has on the story of the Fall, in which he writes that we find “the eternal mythus of man—in fact, the very transition by which he becomes man.” The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 321–22.