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ABSTRACT
In this paper I raise three questions regarding the status and function of Absolute Knowing in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. First, can Hegel’s Absolute Knowing be understood as an epiphany? Secondly, how does epiphany make sense of the teleological elements that activate and mobilise the movement towards Absolute Knowing? And thirdly, how does such an interpretation shift the focus from a closed reading of Hegel’s text – that views Absolute Knowing as consummately realised – to an open reading that keeps the Absolute within its purview, but also seeks to foreground its aporias? I pursue these questions through an examination of the key constituents of knowledge: the subject of knowledge, its object, and the process through which knowledge is attained.
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Notes
1. See (Chappell Citation2019, Citation2022). On Iris Murdoch see (Browning Citation2018a; Citation2018b). For an illuminating discussion and comparison of Murdoch and Hegel pivoting on the idea of ‘lived experience’ see (Browning Citation2022).
2. For a more detailed definition see (Chappell Citation2022, 3). On the question of transience scholars agree that this is common but not essential in epiphanies. See (Chappell Citation2022; Petridou Citation2016).
3. Non-religious meanings of ‘epiphany’ are attested as far back as Democritus who speaks of epiphaneiai as ‘surfaces’ or ‘visible aspects’ (Chappell Citation2022, 6). The secular contexts of epiphanies are also discussed in (Ingle Citation1993).
4. L.A. Paul’s term ‘transformative experience’ is also relevant here as it focuses on how experience is necessary for having certain epistemic capacities and cognitive abilities (Paul Citation2014).
5. It would be helpful at this point to establish a similarity and a difference between epiphanies as applied to Hegel and Chappell’s analysis. Chappell argues in favour of the primacy of experience over theory-building – an aspect that, she argues, has been ignored by moral theorists and which she summarises elegantly by the phrase ‘argument trails in the wake of experience’ (Chappell Citation2022, 49–53). It is easy to see that this also applies to the development of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology. The Gestalten that self-consciousness successively inhabits are motivated by the frustrations caused by a mix of anticipation and failure that self-consciousness experiences. Other Hegel scholars have also highlighted the importance of experience over argument in the context of the Phenomenology, such as, for example, Emundts who writes: ‘[n]ot an argument, but the insight that what I’m doing doesn’t make sense at all forces me to adopt a new position of knowledge’ (Emundts Citation2022, 66). But Hegel would not generally be against theory-building; in fact, he sees the Phenomenology as the necessary propaedeutics to the Logic, where the chief modality is argument.
6. Bernasconi argues that Hegel’s strategy in FK is a ‘double reading’ of Kantian philosophy whereby Kant is both commended for introducing the deduction of the categories and criticised for limiting them to the faculty of the understanding (Bernasconi Citation2016, 139–42).
7. Abbreviations used.
Poet.= Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, in The Complete Works of Aristotle Vol. 2, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991).
FK = G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977).
PS = Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
PW = G.W.F. Hegel, Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
CJ = Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
8. Cf. PW, 137: ‘But it is one thing to impose determinacies on the individual under the form of infinity, and another to impose them absolutely’. For an analysis of this point see (Roupa Citation2020).
9. It is for this reason that there cannot be a definition of the Absolute; whatever definition might be offered, it will inevitably be ‘finite’. See (Plevrakis Citation2019, 261–62).
10. Cf. Cooper’s discussion of Darstellung in (Cooper Citation2017, 579).
11. See the discussion of this in (Roupa, Citation2022, 353).
12. It is interesting that all three of the Faust versions considered here make reference to cultish religious practices, which Hegel also discusses in the ‘religion’ section in the Phenomenology. Though not mentioned by name, epiphany makes an appearance here and paves the way for Absolute Knowing: ‘the self gives itself the consciousness of the divine Being descending to it from its remoteness’, and through this act, divine Being ‘receives the actuality proper to self-consciousness’ (PS §714). It’s also worth remembering that for Hegel religion is intimately connected to art, which does not merely serve to illustrate the idea of the divine being but literally permeates the whole modality of thinking appropriate to this stage through what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’ [Vorstellung]. The transition to Absolute Knowing will mark the transition from picturing to knowing, but without setting up a new opposition between the two.
13. There are interesting parallels between the kind of remembrance entailed in Harry Angel’s reawakening and the involuntary memories of the main character in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, as discussed in (Peters Citation2010). Indeed, these memories have a flavour of the epiphany to them – arriving, as they do, unwarranted, unintended, unplanned.
14. On this point see also (Novakovic Citation2023).
15. In his own reading of Absolute Knowing, and especially of the very last paragraph of the Phenomenology, Boldyrev highlights the need for science to ‘relinquish itself of the form of the pure concept’ and for spirit to be one with sensuous consciousness, ‘the beginning from which we started’, as Hegel puts it (PS §806). The theme of the return is a recurrent pattern in Hegel, who views the dialectic as unending and forwards-moving. See (Boldyrev Citation2021, 266).
16. Activity as an essential feature of thought is also highlighted by Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘The subject is what it does, it is its act, and its doing is the experience of the consciousness of the negativity of substance’ (Nancy Citation2002, 5, emphasis in the original). For a helpful reading of Nancy’s account of Hegel focussing on the notion of ‘restlessness’ see (Lumsden Citation2005).
17. Žižek, Ruda and Hamza point out the farcical dimension to the immediate aftermath of Hegel’s thought, precipitated by the preparation and publication by some students of an edition of Hegel’s work that became ‘highly influential’, yet caused ‘profound confusion’ about ‘the true kernel and thrust’ of the Hegelian system. There is undoubtedly irony in the fact that Hegel’s future, if there is one, arises out of division and splits, and potentially also misunderstandings, that ‘farcically enact Hegel’s own claim that any immediate unity […] will need to undergo processes of alienation and division to, at least possibly, reinstate the original division in reflected form’ (Žižek, Ruda, and Hamza Citation2022, 1–2).