Materials for Reading 2

Monday, June 6
§§17-33

As opposed to the pure, intellectual intuition of Schelling’s shapeless absolute as totality, Hegel now puts forward his own unique thesis. This thought, whose meaning will only be made explicit by its entire exposition, is expressed as “grasping the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject. The term ‘substance’ does not here refer to an Aristotelian οὐσία, or indeed a chemical substance; rather Spinoza’s idea is here meant. He recalls how the era reacted with outrage against Lessing, and through him Spinoza, who had first proclaimed God or nature as substance, sparking the Pantheismusstreit in Jacobi’s letters. He points out how there must be some truth to this rejection of God as mere substance, and that this represents the implicit demand that the absolute be conceptually grasped as equally subject. By this he means that it is only by way of a self-conscious apprehension of the presence of subjectivity in the realm of our shared collective practice-internal being, and not mere objectivity, can truth as such be attained. Hegel goes on to analyze and develop his conception of subjectivity along the lines of Fichte in the Wissenschaftslehre, as an essentially self-determining, and therefore free, being. Subjectivity is not merely an empty, finite vessel that relates itself to an already given sensory world; nor is it an artificer constructing empty thoughts which it then imposes on a ‘real’ given world that is non-conceptual. (Locke / Nominalism). The subject is the movement of positing itself, and is essentially a dynamically articulated flow impossible to capture in the language of a substance metaphysics. As we are going to see later, the Hegelian philosophy has a special role for this kind of self-unraveling or self-specifying kind of reality. Hegel discusses this being, or better, process in terms of a self-restoring self-sameness; or a return to the self from a self-imposed self-othering.