Dear friends, this may be the first Bestandsaufnahme of my career of Bestandsaufnahmen. I did not know this at the time. I only attempted to provide an almost Prussian table of contents for the thesis as it was. The thing about Hegel is that there is no rigid, formulaic dialectic: the Spirit does not know necessarily how it will get through: this is the ART of history itself. It is the art of Hegel's writing as well: he does not know the outcome of the story, save through prayer.
Prayer would lift us out of the text: but at least Hegel is willing to invite a telling of world history as a dynamic text that is at the center of focus: we are not off on a tangent of an abstract absolute God expressed through geometric rules, nor are we on the blind track, unable to see the forest for the trees. We are not interested in discussing even the pre-ontologicity of Being: we are set about to discuss the one and important thing: the history of our species and of the entire planet. This is an inflated discourse, to be certain, but it is aware of the firey depth of History.
I will not fault Hegel as being a fascist, who sought to steam-roller all other cultures and ethnicities under the rug of one single phallogocentric European historicism: rather he entered with telling the story of a great, and greatly imaginative spirit that wanted to meet other spirits and other history-sayings, to stand corrected, broken, but woven into the vessel (remember Schillers Chalice is overflowing at the end of Hegel's Phenomenology) that would contain and nurture the fertile living civilization of this Earth. People have used his work in this manner to manifest imperialist abomination, or they laughed at him, interpreting him this way. But either this interpretation or it's dismissal is, as one friend pointedly said: a "dead end."
What is not a dead end is a certain telling or phrasing of history. And a history that is a passionate tale that involves you and me. There was a phrase in the Peter Brook use of the screen-play of the Mahabharata: Vyassa said that he had composed the history of the entire human race: "When you listen to it, at the end you will be somebody else!" And yes, this is what we want. We want the world, or a book, to change us ("into ourselves!" -Rilke, 9th Duino Elegy). We hunger for transformation. Hegel's book may leave us tired and stodgy at the end of it, cooked out of our eyes with tedious trenches of text: but the promise he wrote to was the promise of CHANGE.
And the history as I interpret it, in a subtle poetic form, runs in the downward falling of a poem: a table of contents.
"I:A Against what text do we read Hegel's Aesthetics?"
Looking for a context. Wise enough, and written with an initial sense of conflict, appropriate to history: embracing the clash of opposites spoken of from Democritus onward (note, see what Hegel writes of Democritus in "The History of Philosophy). In this voice I read the influence of Harvey Rabbin: Rabbin was always speaking of texts: not of books, but threads, lines: becomings... thoroughly Deleuzian: the continual, looming act of weaving: and the protective element of the text should be noted as well: in the textile is printed certain patterns expressive of singular ethnicity: as opposed to the modern MEANINGLESS universality of words: the singular, idiorrhythmic, force sends the tribe out, traveling across a series of places: loving a place. So the question is one of context, frame, placement, Gestell, "set up" (and all the painful betrayal a "set up" can entail).
"I:B Hegel and the Spirit of his Age."
This seems to be a conservative swing: it tells us we can look forward to yet another discussion of the stage of German and European history in the 18th and 19th Century. We should be able to explain everything easily by doing this, but we may have lost the audience in the process.
Nobody wants to read about Europe (chauvenism) again, except in the light of an era of contested and emerging realities from the entire globe: as ONE contested-reality. Hegel and Post-Colonial Thinking. Is it worth speaking about Napoleon charging into Jena during the completion of the Phenomenology? Even though we know where Napoleon went after that (back to Empire) there was a feeling of courage, and liberation in the age of ideas over the blood bath the Christian Faith was descending into. AND he wanted to save Christendom as well: he wanted to affirm an overall goodness to the reality, the spirit of his age. Such an affirmation, the Idea, lives in the spirit of immediate choice, but dies immediately in the realm of apodictic rule. But such a choice has to remain outside of the confines of all the choices one is given: revolution outside of "brand names and gadgets" (Marcuse, 1-Dimensional Man). Napoleon in the moment of entering Jena may have momentarily been outside of Brand-names and gadgets, but I get ahead of myself...
"I:C Division of Subject."
This sounds like good homiletic structure for a Thesis: "I am going to tell you what I will be talking about." Good, fine. What I can say is that I will still look at the pun: "division of subject," as being an invitation into the diremptive art of opening up not a "subject-matter" but the subject itself, consciousness, a way of knowing. A division of subject is quite literally what it says: a subject that is divided (against itself). I can say that it is a gentle way of saying that the sense of being a subject is already multiplied, problematized, variegated, and in any way possible blurred. Of course the literal sense of this remains painfully cold: "we will speak on the division of subject matter, we will speak of nothing else!"
"IIA The issue of the Status of Art."
(I am adding periods at the end of these phrases to make them even more punctual). This is where it stood in society at the time of the writing of the Phenomenology? Art is generally related to status, those who practice and work in the realm of art generally attain a higher status, and prefer the cultural capital (Bordieu, "On Distinction") of having refinement of taste. "De Gustibus Disputandum est," may be the war cry for Adorno, but it throws yet another net, a painful net of constriction to suggest that Art, and higher taste may be a matter of mere vanity, arrogance and entitlement of a revulsively hated upper class (even more so because I was having to deal with my own relationship to our family's status of distinction in the emerging world of Los Angeles in the 20th and 21st Century) (... searching for a way beyond "distinction" and it's brutal, cruel counterpart of chauvenism, elitism) (note: my father's reading of Will Durant's "How to Read a Book" at the beginning of my family's movement into the sphere of education).
"1. Hegel's Agreement with the Romantics: the worthiness of Art."
I sincerely hope I found a quote that expresses a genuine opinion that Hegel had about other Romantic philosophers and artists in his age. I worry that I may have been too lazy and perhaps too confused to simply do more than go on pontificating (as this web-log will let me do endlessly here: the worst "Schlechtes Unendigkeit" one has to deal with).
Note that "worthiness" is not capitalized. Perhaps I did not put "worth" on the same level as "Art." Art still seemed to be a synthesis of true "beauty" with "genius," all of which seemed to out-shine the issues of worth and worthiness. The dirt-poor open and empty category of humbleness through which worth is set here may be concerning. Art is great, but is it above Value? (Here it would be relevant to take the opportunity to make a digression into a pontification about Nietzsche and the "Transvaluation of Values" and "The Will to Power as the Work of Art.")
"2. The Critical Point of Disagreement - a comparative study"
Once again an emphasis of the struggle, disagreement, contention, difference, and difference of belief. All for it.
"II B On the Issue of Greece and Greek Art."
Here I had a debt to pay not only to Hegel, but to J. Glenn Gray, whom was spoken of only in terms of respect by Dr. Harvey Rabbin. I would like to take this moment to recognize how much this figure of Dr. Rabbin appeared to me in every way to be heroic, noble and brilliant to me in the story of making my thesis. With this same "nobility" comes the error of "Distinction" that in all likelihood Rabbin himself would be the first to point out.
I will remember a distinction (and once again it is the haunting tain of aristocratic distinction that fragments the mirror): the distinction made frequently about the greeks: they were a "flower" of civilization, where the Romans, and the Caesars, and the Kaisers after them all were the scions of a strangling vine of colonialism. The Greeks got it right because they did not hold on to their conquerings. At least the Greeks got it right insofar as they did not keep hold of turning the world into a single "Alexandria" (Though all these great and small dictators of history spoken of here seem to have missed the point).
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(fragmentary, broken off for the sake of making my morning walk)
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