What in the hell …

I’m having a renewed interest in matters German, partly in preparation for and partly as expressed in a plan to soon read more Kant, as a rather long detour on the way to aesthetic questions. It’s bit frustrating as I like to have a clearer map than I currently do of what I’m after, and because my German is pretty scheisse, but I think there’s a possible coherence to be stitched together later. The immediate points I can see are a dislike on my part for certain postructuralisms I’ve encountered and a dislike for certain Hegelianisms, both primarily in relation to Marxism, and a general interest in the past as contemporary with the present (a la a tesseract or perhaps a dialectical image). Two-fold interest then, put schematically, in historiography and in some specific historical contents obscured by bad accounts, with two purposes - one to disentangle from bad accounts (to not get tied up in knots), and another to clear space for moments that have their own sort of … loveliness.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Andrew Bowie’s introduction to Manfred Frank _The Subject and the Text_. I forgot how much I like this stuff.

Bowie writes:

“Any attempt to encompass a totality must either adopt a perspective outside the totality, and thus include the totality in itself as only a relative totality, or face the problem that totalities cannot describe themselves as totalities, because the description would have to include a description of the description and so on ad infinitum. The claim that a particular kind of explanation is converging to the absolute conception [a cherished idea of metaphysical realism] must already know what that conception is, as otherwise it would have no way of recognizing that the true conception had been reached. But what sort of knowledge would that be, given that it must be immediately available from the outset, as it would otherwise itself be relative to other knowledge, and therefore not absolute? This is (…) exactly the objection Schelling made against Hegel’s conception of the Absolute, which claimed not to presuppose anything and yet to be able to arrive at the absolute Idea. In this light any conception of the Absolute might appear doomed to failure, and only relative conceptions of reason would seem possible. In a Nietzschean perspective, of the kind familiar in much literary theory, this would mean, though, that no conception of reason is possible at all, and there can only be relative perspectives. Putnam denies this by claiming that ‘The very fact that we speak of our different conceptions as conceptions of rationality postits a Grenzbegriff, a limit-concept of the ideal truth. Romantic philosophy is concerned precisely with the nature of this Grenzbegriff, which relates to what Romantic philosophers mean by the ‘Absolute.’ This leads Romantic philosophy to the question of aesthetics and [Manfred] Frank to his version of many of the issues that have been central to literary theory and which are now beginning to play a role in analytical philosophy.” (xxx-xxxi.)

Among the other points I like in the intro is a general, though understated and not as polemical as could be, sense that the reports death of the subject have been greatly exaggerated, as there are resources in the German early romantics for “conceptions of the subject which are not open to the critique of Hegelian self-presence” (xxix.) He quotes someone named Shoemaker, “Perceptual self-knowledge presupposes non-perceptual self-knowledge, so not all self-knowledge can be perceptual.” (xxiii.) Bowie doesn’t address it, but I like the point as, among other things, a way to undermine the facile Saussurean (and Spinozian, all determination as negation) account of language - “bat is only bat because it’s not cat, fat, hat, etc.” The ability to distinguish any of these utterances from each other presupposes the ability to distinguish an utterance from a hiccup, a breath, a twitch, static, etc. The exteriority (language) said to determine interiority (the subject) is only recognizable by a prior presupposition. That presupposition is, I think, the problematic of the Absolute that Bowie references. Among the other things I like about this is a rather mean-spirited glee on my part at being able to charge irritating anti-Hegelianisms with problems similar to that of Hegel and use some of the same tools of the (right thinking) Hegel critique against them. The philosophy of sharp pins, the theoretical practice of deflation. Though one does want to … *ahem* avoid being too much of a prick.

(I had a course with Bowie when I was in college, during a semester stay in England. It ranks among what were for me the headiest intellectual experiences - second only to my encounter with Marx, and many of the issues from that encounter were played out in the Hegel seminar with Bowie - and by far the most formative. Among what was impressive was the ability to move seamlessly and in a way that seemed natural - these are contemporaries, they’re working on the same questions - from constellations like Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, to Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and to Quine. Putnam, Sellars, McDowell. It wasn’t a “this all the same” but more of a building bridges between locations, introducing folk at a gathering and getting them to talk to each other.)

Notes to self - after this book, eventually, Frank’s What Is Neostructuralism, and his most recently translated book on German romanticism, and Bowie’s most recent on German philosophy. Also Peter Dews, Beiser’s recent and Millan-Zaibert’s.