spikenard

Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of the absolute. To philosophise the absolute, to conceptualise or theorise it, is not exactly the same as thinking the absolute. At the level of philosophy I think that Hegel succeeds absolutely but today I am only interested in how this theoretical success is not the same as successfully thinking something (to designate a word for god is not to think god). Lately I’ve become more and more interested in the difference between the formal and the informal and how thinking is not fully formalisable; that every time we formalise we leave somewhich behind; that the power of abstraction is exactly the same as the weakness of simplification.

Now often when we set out to think somewhich we end up theorising somewhich instead. As the difference between thinking and theory is not often keenly felt I’m going to put forward an argument that can be understood in terms of emotion. The emotion of surprise – the plausibility of its occurrence and the strict necessity of its absence – will today be invoked to demonstrate the failure of Hegel to think the absolute. Since Hegel’s ambition to think the absolute is an unbounded ambition I hope that this demonstration will have some exemplarity (though, of necessity, not a pure exemplarity which would be to repeat the mistake that I seek to expose in the first place).

Hegel is not the first thinker to attempt to think the absolute. To attempt to think the absolute has always been a tendency within philosophy, sometimes it has been celebrated as the greatness of philosophy and sometimes it has been a naive by product of simply trying to use language. The attempt to think the absolute has been celebrated as the greatness of philosophy when it has been felt that, in trying to think Being or God, one is trying to do something more important than trying to think whatever was less painfully abstract (as if difficulty was its own merit – get the fuck in here Nietzsche and hoover up this martyrdom!). The attempt to think the absolute has been a naive by product of simply trying to use language because all language involves abstraction and the absolute is in some sense only the unquestioned operation of such abstraction. An operation that can all too easily pass unremarked for the operation of a pure abstraction: an absolute abstraction, the absolute.

How does one think the absolute, how does one think infinity? The short answer is one doesn’t. The longer answer is that one invents a special kind of thought, the theoretical thought, in order to think you can do so. Theory is invented to make what seems impossible for thought seem possible after all. I’m going to explain this in terms of Being, even though I could do so with numbers or with god or with many other permutations of the same gesture, the absolute gesture.

Lets look at the theory of Being because we are working backwards from the phenomenon of the philosophical inheritance in which the theoretical level has already been in operation for millenia (or thought that it was in operation). (The theory of) Being is to be understood in contradistinction to beings, beings are things and things partake in Being but are not the same as Being. Being is not a thing. Being is infinite and absolute but beings are finite and particular.

This is the theory of Being but we have not gotten far into the theoretical nature of Being yet. To get into the theoretical nature of Being we must leave the theoretical sphere and excavate the prior sphere of thought that was necessarily involved in this (somewhat dubious) achievement, that is we must ask how one attempts to think Being. Now we have finite experiences and a capacity for understanding that is (crudely speaking) the ability to generalise and simplify those finite experiences. We experience many beings but not an infinite number of beings.

In order to come up with infinite Being it is not enough to abstract from our finite experience of beings. In order to come up with infinite Being we must abstract from our finite experience of beings and add to this generalisation of past experience the component of thought that makes it theoretical – we must build into the finite abstraction an openness to new experience. We must transform the finite abstraction into a hungry generalisation, a generalisation that will consume all new finite experiences. This generalisation no longer operates merely as an abstraction from past experience but as an abstraction from past experience and from future possible experience. The theoretical sphere is achieved through an abstraction from presupposed possibility. An abstraction from possibility that is open to possibility not as genuine openness or genuine possibility but as the pre-control of possibility.

The pre-control of possibility is a device of thought. The device is itself thinkable and it mediates the infinity that is itself impossible to think but to think the mediation of infinity is not to think infinity itself. The infinite is seemingly made thinkable by theory but theory also becomes that which prevents the thinkability of the infinite. It becomes the final obstacle that cannot be crossed in the form of the mediation that cannot be that which it mediates.

To think Being is not really to think beings. The hungry generalisation of Being means that everywhere I look I will find more beings to think within the already established theory of Being but the theory does not allow me to think these finite beings in the way that looking around for them does. When I think World I do not actually think the world itself (which is impossible for reasons more mundane than that of a priori necessity but no less profoundly impossible because of that).

Hegel realises this on some level. Hegel states that to think zoo is not to think the animals in the zoo. When we think zoo we obviously know that animals will be involved but we don’t know exactly what types of animals are going to be at the zoo or what individual animals will be filed under the heading of each species. The pre-control of possibility means that all the animals are placed into the space that has already been prepared for them to fill.

To claim to think the absolute is to fail to grasp the limitations of theoretical thought. It is a failure to allow openness to really be open or possibility to really be possible. It is to require a strict absence of surprise – no matter what is encountered it must be slotted into the ongoing attempt to think the absolute as if nothing had actually occurred. As if everything was completely normal, always boring, and nothing ever really happened.

Hegel can never be surprised because Hegel can never allow himself to be surprised…but emotions are not within anyones’ power to forbid. Surprise just occurs, not only does surprise just occur but it is likely to occur. Surprise is plausible but subject to a strict but necessarily nominal exclusion. Hegel cannot allow himself to ever be surprised but he cannot prevent himself from feeling surprised, only from showing how he feels. Surprise is plausible so Hegel can only act unsurprised when surprise actually does occur, Hegel can try to adopt a poker face but a poker face is all it is. If Hegel admits surprise then that is to admit that the absolute is not being thought, that the absolute is only being conceptualised and in a necessarily limited manner.

Hegel’s face never betrays the slightest surprise at the zoo, not even when he passes the platypus.

Addenda:

1. Vega’s Emotional Fallacy

MIA

Did ya think of something to say?

VINCENT

Actually, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you about, but you seem like a nice person, and I didn’t want to offend you.

MIA

Oooohhhh, this doesn’t sound like mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat. This sounds like you actually have something to say.

VINCENT

Only if you promise not to get offended.

MIA

You can’t promise something like that. I have no idea what you’re gonna ask. You could ask me what you’re gonna ask me, and my natural response could be to be offended. Then, through no fault of my own, I woulda broken my promise.

VINCENT

Then let’s just forget it.

2. The Platypus Surprise

Everyone knows that when the platypus was discovered by naturalists it didn’t fit neatly into convenient categorisations of animal types as it’s an “egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal”(wikiplatypus). The first naturalists encountering the Platypus must have thought something along the lines of “Aha! Just another species of…no wait…I have no fucking idea what this is.”

As recently as 1997 it was suggested that it should have its own category of animal type, the Plotypoda, that contains just itself and its fossil forebears. Now to give the platypus its own genre makes sense from an evolutionary point of view where one is interested in reconstructing the complex inter relations in the prior lineage of existent life but from a contemporary perspective there seems little point in having a whole genre heading with only one entry.