Thesis on Hegel: Memories of an Education

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).

....

(fragmentary, broken off for the sake of making my morning walk)

....

Hegel, Jung and Catastrophic Dismissal of Everything

Hegel spoke solely to the history of ideas. Jung spoke to the history of nightmares.

Hegel spoke to the Absolute Spirit. Jung spoke to the Spirit of Depth.

Did Hegel speak for the spirit of his times? Jung spoke against the spirit of his times.

Books have been devoted to the discussion of the "Absolute Spirit," what can be said of the Absolute Spirit is that it awaits the fullest authorship.

What can be said of the Spirit of Depth is that it contests us and our ability to be as we believe ourselves to be. It is the heart of the spirit that says the Work is not yet complete and we are not the completed image. I believe this message very deeply.

Hegel is accused of being a colonialist of ideas: that he is colonizing the mind with the Euro-phallogo-anthropo-centric Christ. (Christ, and more specifically formal "Christianity," being the synthesis of Judaic religion, as the making of the mask, and Roman religion as the making of the Beast.) The Idea is just as easily the mark of the Beast, Caesar, and the Empire, no matter how we coat it with Christian "Love," "Agape," (As Jung will call Sentiment, wedded with Brutality, "Symbols of Transformation" cw vol. 6, p. 428). I will hammer against this Hubris of the Christian Faith: the presumption is that our condition is fundamentally kind, that "humanity" is somehow fundamentally kind, with a kind of freezing chill: we do not know what the universe holds for us. We do not know if we are simply victims devised for torment, or if we are unfolding and developing souls who take part in the manifest grace we call "Evolution of Consciousness-Planet." To all of this "Sense" we have Nietzsche's condemnation: "Blödsinn!" (Jensits, aphorism 35)

-To the accusation of "nonsense," we paraphrase Jung's admonition: "Things so easily dismissed by day cannot be denied in the Dark" (Psychology of the Transference). In such a darkness we cannot deny our persistent nagging doubts, or escape being harangued and humiliated by our cacophonous, revolting, ugly desires. In the pitch and pulse of literal-images of the night there lurks the chase by our tormentors.

In the face of dealing with the fact that we cannot know our position, we prefer motion to the frozen eternity of understanding our peril. (Might go right or left!) That is to say, I will tell you what I make is a move to the Anima: the soul that causes us to have --motion. It is the move to prefer the illusion, to the equal illusion of Satanic dominion over this earth. It is a move to choose, once again, to pick up the Christian hubris of sentiment, preferring also a kind of eternal punishment (that we see written all through the work of Franz Kafka), to the static acceptance that we do not know what the universe gives us.

(Jung wins with the nightmare. It arrests our attention. We go back to our work, dismissing them as nonsense.)

The mistake with these thinkers, and the relevancy or irrelevancy of the universe, per-se, is to utterly dismiss them.

I don't see the ideas I spoke of leading to the creation of gas chambers. I see that these ideas acknowledge something other than our sense or our definitions of "nonsense." I should hope that keeping the fire of knowledge and contention, and living views, alive does exactly what it does. It keeps the flame.

I am deeply concerned by all thinkers who first make the mistake of expressing intolerant ideas. Hegel can be condemned for being out-dated, but I believe he does not have a chance to defend himself. I am even more concerned that Jung and Heidegger did not make every move they could to integrate their philosophy after the war (The Second World War) with Jewish philosophers: that they did not make right their Germanic affront in the ultimate and most public sense of "restitution." They did not make sufficient effort to think outside their own ethnicity, they dismissed the world (Heidegger, more problematically, as the direct descendant from Hegel). Jung's work is relevant because he thinks in global archetypal issues: he welcomes the images and symbols of all nations with a profound equanimity. One could almost say that anything Jung sees he believes. That is why his books are so over-filled with archetypal images from every color and strain: it is a true attempt at post-colonialism. Hegel at least speaks of a world and tries to "incorporate" the world. Here the essence is not the system, or the connection between "incorporation" and fascism: one head. The essence is one where there is a peering outside of the finite colonial world that says that "sense=sense" a tautological prison predicament in the shape of the lamia of horrific sameness: Euro-centric, Phallogo-centric.... The essence here remains that there was at least a move to see outside the one for a moment....

Thesis on Hegel: Memories of an Education

Exhaustion seems like a good place to start. So much has been made between Oppermann and I about exhaustion, the exhaustion of a thought, or thinking until one is exhausted. At the time of this thesis, we had not stumbled into the labyrinth of exhaustion to any real degree. We had experienced fragments of this exhaustion reading Kafka to each other, or staying up and speaking, sipping wine and coffee until we thought we were half-dead. Exhaustion is a word that can rightfully be dedicated to Oppermann. If Genet had his Lady of the Rose, Oppermann had his Lady of Exhaustion. And it saved us many times from the back avenues of Genet's dismay at taking his desire too literally. Oppermann introduced me to Genet and Exhaustion. He did not introduce me to ladies directly, though I am honored to have met some of the women whose life with him met at an intersection. Exhaustion is many ways safe. And it was enough to attempt a modicum of shelter in the genius of exhaustion.

When I spoke about Avant Garde Art, I was speaking with reference to at least two major encounters with art history that I had had to that time: one was the television documentary called "The Shock of the New," the other was a visit to the Fin de Siecle work of Gustav Klimpt presented around this time at the Los Angeles County Museum of art. Both the work of the documentary and the exhibit evoke a sense of awe and respect for the history of art in the 20th Century. It is not certain that at the time of my thesis I was making the nihilistic, unimaginative assertion that "it's all been said and done, so what's the point." That is the terrible foot-dragging depression behind all of this, the child-like obsession with a turn of novelty, and despair that this novelty might not ever be made present...

"For Hegel the Idea must embrace the terrible extinguishing of the world, and the very way all things must come to an end."

This idea came to me before I read one of my favorite passages in Jung, from Symbols of Transformation (cw vol. 5 para 577): indicating that the true essence of the mother was "separation and farewell."

The pillory where criminals were scourged was also known as the Hekate; and to her, as to the roman Trivia, were dedicated junctions of three roads, forked roads, and crossroads. Where the roads branch off or meet, dog sacrifices were offered to her, and there too were thrown the bodies of the executed: the sacrifice occurs at the point of union. Where the roads cross and enter into one another, thereby symbolizing the union of opposites, there is the “mother,” the object and epitome of all union. Where the roads divide, where there is partition, separation and splitting, there we find the division, the cleft [scheide: “parting,” “sheath,” “vagina”] – the symbol of the mother and at the same time the essence of what the mother means for us, namely cleavage and farewell. (pp. 370-371)"

The passage I have copied out again is not new any more to me. I have had at least 20 years of sifting and shredding it's value. It remains a kind of totem that wards against my own sentimental turning back: because it keeps shutting the door, it says that the process is one of separation from my vanity and pride. Bob Dylan continues to speak also true: "when you thought you lost everything, you find out you can lose a little more."

Hermes is a thief, he steals time in terms of dedication to a seemingly futile alchemical endeavor, that friends will oft point out are dead-ends. Hegel and Jung are dead-end philosophers. Hermes is a thief of memory, where so many times the right mode of speech or the right story are forgotten. The thief, with a cloak and dagger at the crossroads might back-stab you. But we are talking of time, my dear friends, and this is merely metaphor.

Was it not enough to continue to dream of a dream that might have been? Is it not important to give creedence to my youthful shape, who believed something that time and again experience has told me was incorrect? It is not the dream, or the vision of the youth that should be ignored, simply his arrogance, his bitter coarseness, his forced rhyme. The youth asks: Is it better to be crushed by it's impossibility (of the "celestial possible") than to be capable of one last smug determination that speaks, twists it's tongue to this very moment in a sneer that said: "told you so?"

The devil, brought up like this with his twisted physiognomy, is no pretty picture. The truth the devil speaks remains the phrase that will haunt this account: "don't go off living pipe-dreams, indeed, but listen with your whole heart to the music of Pan..."

"Yet what undoes the Idea - and Idealism - is that Science itself can no longer claim to be outside of time: as time's infinite and Eternal form. Science is poeticized by a kind of radical temporality."

Here I read the inspiration of Harvey Rabbin, the inspiration at the "thesis" stage of my youth (we had yet to endure the era of "Elective Affinities," and dream once again of Another "Truth.") This remains one of the wonders of Hegelian Dialectic: that in point of fact it is not a logical stillbirth, rather it is a specific way in which knowledge actually grows: not only as an empire, or as a kind of apparatus of capture of the "State Apparatus" (Acknowledging the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on Harvey Rabbin and in turn on me: a Marxist approach: "radical temporality," that was bound to overturn existing orders, neither indulging in the deadly fetish of revolution, nor staying with the "spirit of the time" (Jung, Red Book), Kapital) ...but as a genuine profoundly painful searching for the transition of knowledge.

Does knowledge have to be painful? Only if that knowledge dares to deal with the shadow of imperialism, eurocentrism: all of which have been accused of Hegel. Nevertheless it is a question

"....thesis, antithesis-synthesis, forget about it." Slavoj Zizek on Hegel see also Zizek on Hegel part 2...

(Though Zizek deteriorates for minutes to baudy sexual jokes, he remains Lacanian, and true to finding some way of dealing with some of the most potentially deadened intellectual material: perhaps through engaging enough of the bawdy adolescent male who would dare to say: "exactly what is in Hegel's writing anyway?")

"Hegel in a way was a historicist, but, the main feature of the historical thought-program is evolutionary mobilism... that everything is historically motivated, and so on, where our historical experience begins, it is the experience of a certain impossiblity, in the sense of a historical break, you cannot go back to the past. If you do the practice attains a radically changed meaning..." (Zizek on Hegel, 2 or 16 3:40 ff)

Zizek is pointing to the same radical temporality, that suggests, once again that the only de-facto history we have is bound to the present.

In writing that the "Idea and Idealism is no longer outside of time," I am, of course displacing the Eurocentric approach to historicising. Nevertheless, I will appeal to Hegel for a story of knowing. This is not the same as the "thought construct" what Kierkegaard dismissed with a shrug of his shoulders. In fact a better story of knowing has rarely been told. It is up to us to investigate this knowing-in-time, with a fool-hardy impatience to know, and with enough temperance to renounce, release the accomplishment, entrance to Gelassenheit.

Thesis on Hegel: Memory of an Education

"Art, considered in it's highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into ideas instead of maintaining it's earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place." (Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. Knox, 1975, p.11)

Perhaps nothing will make me rue my thesis to a greater extent than having to digest the material contained therein. Nevertheless I will attempt to honor the text and choice of text, along with a certain bitterness concordant with the text. It may be that this was, and is the thesis of a young man who looked into the world of studio art and found it to be inhabited by a certain weakness of intellect, ideas that were wishy-washy, lacking some kind of training that would situate them in a genuine context of history, world history, seeking relevance.

I cherish the idea that art actually speaks with a gesture to some aspect that cannot be denied in terms of it's greatness: it is singular, it strives for singularity. This is why the calligraphy of a master calligrapher in many forms of Asian art earns a great sense of respect (at least as I experienced this art in Western galleries: particularly the Norton Simon Museum, 2009, 2010 and an exhibition of art related to Shinnyo-En founder Shinjo Ito in Westwood 2009). Uniform alphabetic writing, written here via the computer strives for singularity through a display of style: something happens that is remarkable when writing is excellent that transfers it once again out of the sameness of the letters. A unique shape begins to emerge through the micro-chiselings of language as writer-text-reader interact.

But in this thesis I seem to plunge ahead with the direct dismissal of art: art is representation, and old forms of representation have been replaced by more accurate techniques (photography, motion pictures, etc.). But this seems to me dreadfully callous. It is the cold, hard edge of technology bearing down on us, about to bite off our shadows and steal our very souls.

At the time of this thesis I had already spent a great deal of energy attempting to read Heidegger and Nietzsche from as many different perspectives as I could. I was greatly impressed with Heidegger's and Nietzsche's "Romanticism" or "Heideggerism:" something rugged and natural. Yet the favorite thesis topic of so many students had been Nietzsche, or Heidegger. Nietzsche was a passionate favorite, but he seemed to abandon history, and having some sense of the struggle and growth of history. On the other hand reading Hegel promised to be a challenge and a form of profound education that would illuminate my love of these later thinkers.

I believe that Hegel would point to the sense that a philosophic idea, The Philosophic Idea, that he believed we lived in, in superseding art carried it's fullness, it's vitality. The greatness of spirit would be part of Hegel's genius integrating Romanticism with Enlightenment thinking and Rationalism: and greatness of spirit would mean a greatness of suffering as well.

Certainly if we look into a current understanding of "genuine truth and life," these words would mean very little if the sacrifice of art were not felt. Perhaps there is little left, when one steps into that ultimate meditation on spirit without art.

The suggestion that the natural world is a thing of the past is also anathema. This would also be a Heideggerian turning, for me: a relation to place, a relation to the earth. This is not a mere turning of ideas.

The turning of earth into ideas has produced a potential catastrophe. The ideas need to be turned into the earth so that they can grow fertile, and so that the beauty of the earth can continue to be replenished.

Home

This is why it is not enough to simply provide you with the sepulchral image of the blank white page with the first scribblings of a student-knowledge.

Is there an image here aside from death, a very temporary triumph of an idea, seeming to leap above the mortal clay of this planet?

"...a vital transition piece, transcending the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment..."

The vitality was in the idea: and in a warring conflict between ideas, a development between ideas: first the Enlightenment, rationalism, followed by a Romantic reaction to the depletion of vitality, replaced by logic, followed by Hegel, who attempted to synthesize the two.

It was in many sense the wash of the extreme of Romanticism that impelled me to write about Hegel as being aware of the "shadow" from the extremes of romanticism. And I must pay the debt to CG Jung for his understanding of the "shadow." The shadow of Romanticism and the pure movement of affect is also a threatened lack of sobriety in the movement of thought. For the Romantics, as I myself might identify myself among them, celebrating them, the threat is that the passionate searching for life through art, culture, civilization... still may do harm. It is not enough to be or remain in any state without successful questioning, self-conscience, with regard to the state.

1990, Thesis on Hegel: Memory of an Education

I would like to begin with looking back.

I would like to look back at an element that eluded my speaking in the previous entry, and that is the title of this work:

"Hegel and the Death of Art"

At the time I was writing this thesis, I was certainly on the edge of the play of these words: Perhaps this meant that art had somehow died and capitulated to philosophy, that beauty was no longer capable of transcending philosophy. There is no more "anima," there is only meaning. The anima animates, so in saying this I am saying that there is no more motion, no more confusion, no more "history." It was, after all 1990 and it was the "end of history" according to Francis Fukuyama. whom both Oppermann and I repudiated. I believe that I may have rejected making any mention of Fukuyama in my dissertation, his philosophy being to me nothing more than a passing fad not worthy of mention. When I look at my bibliography, I would say that I had taken this particular penchant to an extreme: only regarding the greatest works of philosophy as mentionable in my listing of references for books. This I have come to feel is incorrect: there is always a quality of a particular singular niche of literature, where secondary and tertiary authors and epigons should be mentioned: a particular turning of their style that is great in it's own singular nature and should not be simply exempted from the monolythic "cannon" of "great books." (The cannon of "great books" always seemed oppressive and soul-crushing an instrument of domestification and docilification of academics: it's as though we are only supposed to write about Plato or Hegel, and not honor the cry of the soul written on a subway wall.) ("The words of the prophet are written on a subway wall//Concert Hall" --Rush, "Tom Sawyer" from Moving Pictures 1981.) (My beloved spouse intensely dislikes the high tenor voice of the lead singer Geddy Lee.) (Is this personal reverie relevant? --It is a counter-stroke to the force of my senior thesis: Hegel and the Death of Art: I cannot help but find both the real poetry and the soul as well as the devil in the details of my life, and it is why I have had such a profound difficulty with making the bridge to academic life, I would have to lobotomize the parts of consciousness that are associated with a simple work: at bottom I believe that the only people who really care to read ONLY about Hegel, Hegel and the Death of Art, or some sort of senior thesis or whatever, may well be dead inside, and need to talk about their wives, children and animals in the essays they are writing, spinning into hopefully flourid discussions of beliefs and whole landscapes of what they have experienced in their lives....) (!) (enough.)

(toward an ecological phenomenology of knowledge, one bitter and broken association at a time...)

Hegel and the death of Art means that the thesis of this work suggests that Art is dead. This would be a terrible show-stopper. I don't think I can abide by this principle, since I am attached to art. My father wanted me to complete my basic education with a studio art degree, but he wanted to hold philosophy and meaning over my head, like something in which he was inimitably superior, that all artists are just talent, and you have to simply wait and get older to be a philosopher, because there is a horrible, howling growl from the center of our broken civilization: "Everybody knows, everybody knows..."

So I studied philosophy in a manner of defending myself against the grim and overwhelming evidence everywhere of my father's worldly success. And in many ways I became a better scholar than he did. My becoming a better scholar has led me down a path that is many times burned, scorched with cynicism about the process of being in the world, and it has denied me the worldly success in some ways that he might have wished for me: be the artist, be the fool, make beauty.

My father's success is, for me, legendary. This thesis was a step toward my own success, but it also shut the door, it was a death. It was the death of art.

And is there a Death in Art? Is there a not-so-subtle sense of dying to some beauty at hand? Is the death of art the fact that Death belongs to art, and that dying is a matter of aesthetics. Might there be a "Death of Philosophy" as well? The death of art pulls on the heart strings, for without looking at the world as potentially capable of beauty, of moving toward the beautiful, the elegant, the sublime... we look at a grey place of ashes.

"the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of dusk..." (I just discovered and corrected my typographical "own of Minerva," in fact I may be owning a lot of my relation to Minerva in writing all this.) But the owl flies into the gray ashen dusk, the dying embers of the day.

Do you remember, Oppermann, how you helped me to remember the words of Hölderlin?

"Despise not the ashes, for they are the diadem of the heart and the ash of all that endures." (Moreinus, Jung c.w. vol. 14, p.194). "Remember thou art dust." (origin of this phrase is uncertain, apparently Latin.) "Everything is broken." (Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy,, 1989). "The center will not hold." (I apologize, this phrase from Yeats is almost risible, certainly as the pain and sentiment of this essay pours on, yet I will cite: Yeats, "the Second Coming" first printed in The Dial in 1920) ...Not even the center of "Beauty."

All of this is broken, and the Death of Art would be no less of a thesis. But art remains as all things that remain after beauty, after judgement, after the notion of "sublime" and after the discussions of aesthetics and taste. We contemplate the corpse of Christ (Kristeva's essay on "Holbein's Christ" in Zone's Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 1989) or read once again the story from Baudelaire: "Une Charogne," (Les Fleurs de Mal, 1857) a bloated, festering corpse at the side of the road. All of this, even revulsion, vomiting, nausea: all of this in order to save art, to treasure and conserve art at it's limit, the extreme: the communion wafer, still sacred, vomited in the gutter with the broken glass, condoms and cigarette butts.

Nevertheless I will end with Hölderlin's poem (1796-98), unable to comment on it after owing to the problems with change of fonts and styles. The owl of Minerva, and the ownership of Minerva gives us gray, silent taloned death of a field-mouse, but not necessarily death of a man. That is our chance. We may use this "chance" to get away, to escape, to make an escape and to create our world into a better landscape. But praise to the landscape with owls, for death is in the landscape, an open-shut case: no dialog when life is cut short by the swoop of a wing, nevertheless, praises to the landscape.

We would do well to pay the field-mouse heed. Perhaps this owl comes down towards our eyes because of the threat we humans might pose to the owl's nest. Perhaps it is simply the terrifying descent of dusk (as Jung frequently speaks about an "abaissement de niveau mental,")

Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one's self-assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one's self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon [ "Concerning Rebirth, " CW 9i, pars. 213f.]

The unknown duration and endurance of the darkness continues. It is a darkness that continues to grow and deepen alongside the life of each human soul (Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) poem "Yo no soy Yo," Bly translation 1973). The conservancy of such an intense, rich shadow (remaining, as shadows always are, on the edge of palpability, moving from a bare outline in bright light, an undefined, indeterminate structure) is the work of a human life.

Die Kürze

»Warum bist du so kurz? liebst du, wie vormals, denn

Nun nicht mehr den Gesang? fandst du, als Jüngling, doch,

In den Tagen der Hoffnung,

Wenn du sangest, das Ende nie!«

Wie mein Glück, ist mein Lied. - Willst du im Abendrot

Froh dich baden? hinweg ists! und die Erd ist kalt,

Und der Vogel der Nacht schwirrt

Unbequem vor das Auge dir.

1990, Thesis on Hegel: Memory of an Education

"A dry soul is wisest ...and noblest."

Heraclitus, Fragment 230 (Kirk, Raven & Schofield, with my adaptation)

"If it's wrong to think on this
To hold the dead past - to hold the dead past in your fist
Why were we - why were we given memories?
Let's lose our minds
Be set free!

Sometimes I wonder who am I
The world seeming to pass me by
A younger man now getting old
I have to wonder what the rest of life will hold"

--Lou Reed "Who am I" (Tripitena's Song)(2003)

Before it turns to dust, I would like to present what remains of my college thesis on Hegel. It is a matter of recording memories before they are swept neatly away with the dust. This experiment, and therefore it is fraught with considerable danger of being unreadable, a demonstration of sentiment only, unable to contribute anything aside from this damp sentiment. That is part of the need for the admonition of Heraclitus, a request for the dryness of spirit and of wit to liberate us from the valley of this "anima-attachment" to an essay of questionable merit.

Hegel: I believe that Deleuze found Hegel to be a philosopher of the state, and therefore unreadable, un-redeemable, unlike his memorable essays on Kant, and Spinoza, where he freely engaged in a discussion within this discourse called the history of the philosophy.

My friend, Dr J. P. Oppermann, found it in himself to present several essays on Hegel. As I recall his senior thesis was on Hegel's political philosophy. In addition, in 2004 Dr. Oppermann wrote his series of Eight Hegel Meditations. The series of essays was meditative in that it stood on a phenomenology of images and experiences related to Hegel, both past, and, at that time, present. I mention Dr. Oppermann's work because he found it relevant to speak at length about Hegel. Dr. Oppermann has been a profound influence on my thinking throughout the years preceding and extending far beyond this thesis, all the way to my doctoral dissertation on research. I can say that if Dr. Oppermann found relevance in Hegel's work, then it continues to behoove me to carry some respect for Hegel as well.

In order to honor Dr. Oppermann's influence in later thinking, I will note a lengthy passage from his Seventh Hegel Meditation: Dr. Oppermann presents a subliminal reading of Hegel's "Science of Logic" shadowed with Goethe's "Elective Affinities."

Concerning the “chemical process” Hegel states (p. 430):

“Er beginnt mit der Voraussetzung, daß die gespannten Objekte, sosehr sie es gegen sich selbst, es zunächst eben damit gegeneinander sind, - ein Verhältnis, welches ihreVerwandschaft heißt. Indem jedes durch seinen Begriff im Widerspruch gegen die eigene Einseitigkeit seiner Existenz steht, somit diese aufzuheben strebt, ist darin unmittelbar das Streben gesetzt, die Einseitigkeit des anderen aufzuheben und durch diese gegenseitige Ausgleichung und Verbindung die Realität dem Begriffe, der beide Momente enthält, gemäß zu setzen.“

„It begins with the presupposition that the objects in the state of tension, as much as they are strained against themselves, are first precisely strained against each other,- a relation which is called its affinity. Insofar as each stands in contradiction to its own onesidedness of its existence by virtue of its concept, it strives to sublate [aufheben] just this onesidedness. This immediately posits the striving to sublate [aufheben] the onesidedness of the other, and, by way of this mutual equalization and connection, posit reality to the concept that contains both moments.”

There is still neither desire nor time here - but there is at least an intimation that this particular employment of Aufhebung is driven by an „existential“ striving (or pull) which seeks to go beyond the limitation of individual elements towards an equalization through elective affinity movement. This is as far as Hegel will go, to be sure, and yet it is an intimation of the phenomenon of time’s slippage, of time’s rising outside of Being.

Oppermann's essay shows the working of desire through the apparently overly dry text of Hegel's logic. Once again, if we consider Heraclitus "dry soul" we might say that the "Science of Logic" has taken this to it's extreme and in many senses become insufferable, or at the least, almost unreadable. And yet a favorite topic in Oppermann's essay is the theme of desire, he relentlessly pursues desire to its extreme in his essays. The topic of Goethe's "Elective Affinities" shows desire taken to the point of venturing into a prolonged nightmare: the earnest (possibly overly-earnest) intentions of the individuals becomes blemished by experience: two couples meet and exchange partners, but something is lost of the singular passion that brought them together, it reflects a sad state of soul, awash with a wearyness, a displacement of love in its "end."

Equally challenging are the daunting words at the end of this excerpt from Oppermann's 7th Hegel meditation, mentioning the idea of "time's rising outside of Being." This is a philosophic statement, and a Heideggerian one to boot. It may come from the notion that I may have to recover from Dr. Harvey Rabbin at the time of my Hegel thesis presented here: it was Dr. Rabbin who mentioned the line of Shakespeare in terms of dealing with Hegel's philosophic system: "time is out of joint." That is to say that time itself is changing, the sense of time is changing through time. It rises outside of Being. Oppermann may be referring to a line, whose origin escapes me, concerning "time just slips." Equally he may be referring to Bob Dylan, "Time is slipping away," from his song "Not Dark Yet." But this is not slipping and descending, it is "time's rising." Such rising and arousal may be attributable to Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy, which takes as it's departure a sort of closure -- round the notion of the exteriority of Being. Thus time circumscribes Being. Not merely the being of beings, but the unknowable, receding, obscure Being spoken of in Heidegger's writings. I am tempted to link this sense of Being to another of Heraclitus sayings, to "Nature," (and to the shy but brilliant nature spirit, Pan) though undoubtedly Heidegger might call "nature" or "phusis" a "concealment," "Nature loves to hide."

Let me say for my own case of reading Hegel: in the perennial defense of Hegel's work: that Hegel introduces time into the discussion of philosophy, and creates a dynamic movement in the best moments of his thinking. In the worst moments of his writing, Hegel produces a logical still-birth, a forced birth of a resolution according to "historical necessity" that kills the vital spirit. In this case the process is **too dry, and needs to return to the particular in order to replenish itself in the life-giving sustenance of matter and mother alike. Too patriarchal, and a philosophy will lack soul, and that is the threat of Hegel's work. Carl Jung found much of Hegel's writing too forced,

"A philosophy like Hegel's is a self-revelation of the psychic background and, philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically it ammounts to an invasion by the unconscious. The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics, who use terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom." (Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW vol. 8, para. 360)

Perhaps Jung was a little reactive to Hegel's work, and was not in a position to offer a real opinion on the influence of Hegel on the Marxist and post-marxist philosophies of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, for example. These philosophies, influenced by Hegel, originator of a phenomenological method, had profound influence in many aspects of critical theory and remain an important stepping stone of modern thought. Jung by comparison seems to hide in his white doctor's jacket and seems a bit of a philosophic reactionary, intensely wise as a psychologist, but out of his depth when dismissing Hegel with these words. I note equally Jung's prejudice when dealing with James Joyce in his essay on Joyce, there seems to be a philosophic and literary coarseness and rigidity in Jung that writers like Deleuze, Guattari, Sloterdijk, Adorno and others will have the finesse and gentility of heart and spirit to write beyond.

A note must be made to the patina of these pages, which in whatever manner I have contrived, through the use of photo-editing, I have in some reflects amplified. This is because, once again, it is the patina, the tain of the mirror of memory that brings riches and soulful memory to this otherwise arid thought construct, an emblem of academia that I ultimately was repudiated by and ultimately repudiated me. I cannot be correct in my writing here, I can only love the soul of the decaying work as it plunges into oblivion.

Essays and Outer-Works (Vast Attempt Font)

Essays and Outer-Works.

by Justin Ayres PhD

I have realized that much of my graduate essays are about to be lost. In order to postpone the inevitable oblivion I have elected to publish as much as I can on the internet.

To be on the outside, always-already on the outside, is part of the turning thesis and projection of my work. I want to work on the issue of freedom, then I must necessarily be outside of regulation and order of work in the institution.

Yet I believe my essays to be well enough written and regimented (and this is the portion of "Essay" meaning in this work: Essay: the Indo-European root is ag-1, "to drive, draw or move," "Act... Agile... Allege... Assay... Essay... Exact... Redact... Squat..." ): at least this is my hope, acknowleding the institutional policing of the APA style to also allow my own words and work to shine through. I wanted to acknowledge the police enough to offer enough transparency to allow my readers to step in and read my suggestion. But my suggestion is the most wonderful and horrible thing: the content of my essays, the wine of my aphorisms, we are free, we are liberated. What does it mean to be "liberated?" It has something to do with the "fact," that we are always-already on the outside.

Here we should take a cue from psycho-poetic story telling, the description of David Whyte of the boy trapped outside of the hillside where the Pied Piper has played the town's children in. In this sense we are trapped outside: a cripple, just as the child Oedipus, with his feet pinned on a mountainside: outside. (This is not "Anti-Oedipus," in a Deleuzian sense. Rather it is more correctly, momentarily-- Anti-psychoanalytic. It is momentarily suspending the imperative to interpret. It is against the interpretation of Oedipus as "club-foot," the-man-being-corrected. Rather it takes on the "depressive position" (Melanie Klein) of remaining on the outside. To paraphrase David Whyte, "The universe is always just a step-ahead of us. It has to be ahead of us, because the universe is too kind. The universe is too kind not to be a step-ahead of us. We are outside "one-ness" with the universe: the truth, the suffering, the beat goes on. The universe is ahead of us: mercifully. This "mercy" is really intended in the Kabbalistic sense: Chesed: charity, kindness, charisma.

I have always liked the term "Outer-Works," and liken it to the essay "Driftworks" by Jean-Francois Lyotard: drifting always happens in an alternative vector than the immediate frame one expected. Drifting points to an exterior context-strata that is moving in and affecting the vector of discourse.

An outer-work delineates a meeting point with an exterior. In a sense, perhaps dull-mindedly I continue to affirm the possibility of an "exterior" even if it does not or cannot exist (In the terms of Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "The Unsacrificeable."

Two voices snarl, sneer and scream inside my head from the rock-n-roll period: Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. These are not the best of their musical moments: in many ways still lacking enough richness of grief. But they have to be acknowledged, nevertheless, for the sake of saying, "soul-fully," anything meaningful about being on the "Outside."

Bob Dylan snarls and sneers with the outside. He does so many times, sometimes more forcefully than others. But in my conscience, the first thing he says is, "to live outside the law you must be honest..." He says this in "Absolutely Sweet Marie," which says a lot about the true meaning of the song: this is a mother-lover song, and it is a song about loving the sweetness of mother Mary. But the line is sung with a sting of absolutely painful cynicism, born of betrayal. Dylan is betrayed by Marie as well, that is why he sings so incredibly, painfully, "to live outside the law you must be honest."

Is "outside-the-law," some sort of "assumed-agreed discourse? " There is the immediate temptation to laugh: "Assumed-agreed discourse, preposterous!" In fact the phrase sounds Humean, or in any-sense based on the British idea of "common law" and "common sense," particularly when we think of David Hume taking refuge in playing billiards (or, for that matter, the Dude going bowling). But then I make a pause and reflect on myself, the "assumed-agreed" discourse is the form of many of the essay's I would like to publish. The meaning of the message is "outside" the essay form. But the form has to be "assumed-agreed discourse."

Perhaps Bob Dylan means to say, "living in anarchy," that is, living in the context of a "1960's counter-culture," from Easy Rider to Haight-Ashbury disrict, to Golden-Gate Park. But our culture wars over the stories of this period: do we send for the paramedics, or do we slip out to an amazing, abundant, and, yes, indeed, mystic garden? (with the threat of plunder and murder just "outside.") (There we would be in the dance, but then we would be dead, or else in the realm of the living mystics... Either we would be dead as consumers in consumer society, or we would be living in another paradigm of work and energy)

Jim Morrison screamed "Outside"

A feast of friends alive she cried

Waiting for me

Outside.

("When the Music's over")

The only error I can see is that someone was waiting for "me." One could call it an act of absolute grace that anyone waits for "me." This affirms the preservation of the internal, the interior, "me," if only until the moment of the meeting.

But that is a feast of friends. And the feast is always a moment of pronouncement, libation, and consumption. A friend is not a poison. In Morrison's vision there is only total and welcome consumption. There is the "Beautiful Day," spoken of in Agamben: "Bare Life:" "Alive she cried." Morrison's circuit was all that much shorter than Bob Dylan, who through the force of his sadness in "Absolutely Sweet Marie" is forced to wander. Morrison, dead in a bathtub, a Puer at 27 years of age. In a sense Morrison went in, as in "Is everybody in." He went in the gates of the kingdom of Hell or heaven, and now he dwells within, in the intimacy of the inner circle of the immortal images. Dylan, like we living mortals, remains weathering: wearing and weathering on the outside. To be alive thus means, to be alive on the outside.

Those within are in the know, the inner circle. (Be that the pronouncement of Heaven, "it is so!" Or the betrayal of Hell, "it is so!") But this gnosis or this knowing is a kind of death. Those of us on the outside are still living, still struggling with an uncertainty. Does that deprive the dead of uncertainty? Or is that share of uncertainty in fact the grace? It is the grace of what is truly "heaven sent:" the "now."

What is the work of my spirit, before or after death? Is it not to impart deeply of that uncertainty, to carry it as best as possible? Do not the spirits live insofar as they carry the suffering of the uncertain? I could live on, pretending to be dead, to be somehow detached, helpful in the slightest whiffs or gusts of spirit:"If not for my own life then for others..."

But then Her voice, like a gust of wind in me, rises: "That is all nonsense! Life is one! All life is one, and one are the living and the dead!" I am not separate from any other eco-system. My imagined spirit. in carrying the burden of worry, is participating in life.

All life is one, it is interwoven, and thus is why we are on the brink of unweaving our planet's life through our own species overpopulation.

Around our planet is space. It is a void through which travels light, unimpeded. Light travels through space. But life, dense, sticky life, cannot grow outside of this immensely complicated chemical envelope of our planet. Outside the planet is nothing and nowhere, asphyxiation in the ultimate.